Bob Biggs x Swans | Album Art for "To Be Kind"

Swans just released six images from their upcoming album, To Be Kind, which is due out on May 13. The art is by Bob Biggs, a painter and the founder of Slash Records. Michael Gira, frontman of Swans, offered the following comments about how the art came to be featured in the album:

I first met Bob Biggs in Los Angeles in 1976/77, through friends in the so-called punk scene there. He was a conceptual artist, but like everyone else with a brain, he was enthralled with the sudden and concussive events endemic to the rise of the beautifully scabrous punk explosion at the time. He was “outside” of it (as was I, in retrospect), but also in it, and had a sardonic view of it simultaneously. I distinctly remember him arriving at the infamous (genesis site of LA Punk) Masque Club, with a Semi Truck bearing a a fully grown, mucous-dripping cow, and leading it down a ramp into the club, where it ambled about, shat, and was then led out. I’m not certain what this was supposed to actually mean, but it was a delightful event, nevertheless.

Later, I was at the house of a friend (and a friend of Bob’s), and I noticed an unfathomable image on the wall. It was a pastel of one of the baby images we are now using as the art for the new Swans album. An uncanny visual cipher, and it stuck with me, all these years... I look at Bob’s baby images as something like the Mona Lisa—utterly inscrutable, but ACHING to reach up to the surface. Or like one of Jasper Johns’ flag paintings—I just can’t figure them out, but they keep calling me back.



I recall asking Bob in 1981 or so if I could use one of those baby images for a record, and he said, definitively, NO.

But those images have remained in the back of my head since then, always nagging. It seems they’re always calling me, calling, calling...


I’m delighted that these images, finally with Bob’s consent, can now act as innocent, but implacable sentinels for the music of Swans, after all these years.

.. God Bless Bob Biggs...



via Pitchfork.

On The Menzingers' "On the Impossible Past"

On the Impossible Past, the critically acclaimed 2012 release from punk rockers The Menzingers, is among the very best albums of last year for its raw, evocative, lyrical strength. It is a striking statement on the decline of the American dream from the perspective of the youth it left behind.

That the record comes from four musicians who, though now based in Philadelphia, are originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania, should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Northeast PA. Seventy-five years ago, the region and the city of Scranton thrived as an epicenter of anthracite coal mining, but the industry dried up after the Second World War with the rise of oil and natural gas. Gone was the economic and social prosperity. Left on the languishing landscape were culm banks, strip mines, abandoned breakers, and people hard as flint. The Menzingers, with their storytelling prowess and flair for poetic imagery, spark the imagination and manage to tap into the decades-old nostalgia that hangs over that bygone corner of America like the perpetual stratus cloud cover. Furthermore, the impressionistic songs embrace the anguish of the band’s own generation as it grapples with inherited hopelessness.

The world of On the Impossible Past is one of diners and drugs, cigarettes and muscle cars, recklessness and failure. It is a world in which ennui and apathy thrive. Though it is not unique to punk rock or to Northeastern Pennsylvania, it is as pointedly placed--and serves much the same purpose--as Fitzgerald’s “valley of ashes” in The Great Gatsby, a reference to the massive trash-burning dump that existed in Queens en route to the opulence of East and West Egg on Long Island. Both locales are the byproduct of the ever-churning engine of industrialism and commercialism that separates the haves and the have-nots and leaves the latter struggling to find their way among the detritus.

Opportunity seldom avails itself for the characters in these mid-tempo songs. Consequently, they do what they can to stave off pain and loneliness. In “On the Impossible Past,” friends who futilely “always dreamt of having nice things” drink, drive, and ultimately crash their “American muscle car into a ditch on Saw Mill Road.” “Casey” is a recollection “on the long ride back to Philly” of the heyday of a romance with a waitress “before all the parties grew bored.” It chronicles the relationship’s evolution from cigarette-break courtship to every evening “getting drunk before [doing] the dishes…getting high and listening to our boredom…’cause it was so much easier than dealing with everything.” The narrator yearns for the past, to search with Casey “for that old place [they] found forever ago.” In “Gates,” drunkenness behind the Lion’s Club precedes another earnest diner waitress love and a detached second-person voice foretells: “You’ll carve your names into the Paupack Cliffs just to read them when you get old enough to know that happiness is just a moment.”

One of the things that makes On the Impossible Past a distinctly American record for the Millennial Generation is that characters’ longing replaces active striving. The fruitlessness of that inaction can be partly attributed to the decaying, economically depressed environment in which it is set. As “Sun Hotel” states, the region is “the loneliest corner in the whole world…[where] all eyes are glued on the 6:00 news for another fire, another impending deer season.” What is not there for the voices in these songs is as important as what is, and it sparks the idea in “The Obituaries” that “maybe I’m not dying, I’m just living in decaying cities.” Somehow, though, in the absence of vim and vibrancy, the eagerness and impetuosity of youth persist. If there is sweetness or redemption to be found in The Menzingers brilliant third LP, it is in these enduring qualities.