>needless to say, the very same critics and publications that ignored the Swans when they were releasing one masterpiece after the other hailed this mediocre senile work as a masterpiece 30 years later, finding all sorts of hidden meanings in what was simply an astute sellout.
How exactly did Gira sell out with The Seer?
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Holy fuck he actually called them "the Swans"
giving in to the post rock label, hiding lack of ideas behind drones, pandering to the indie community
He didn't. Newer Swans is very much a different take on the exactly same style of music that Swans have always done. Yet there are fans that are irrationally mad for idk what reason. It's not like the new stuff is that easy to digest compared to their 90s stuff.
Why doesn't he shit on any of their more accessible, straight-up folk rock albums or their gothic phase?
People ITT are going to be salty because they like The Seer, but Scaruffi is exactly right on this one.
The Seer is the logical continuation of Swans after Soundtracks.
The old faggot wants to be contrarian. Look at his review of To Be Kind, he struggles greatly to justify his dislike. It's gonna be hilarious when he actually reviews The Glowing Man considering all the reasons he ""disliked"" The Seer and To Be Kind were because "they're not scawwwy enough".
TLDR: Scaruffi believes Pablo Honey is equal in quality to Kid A and The Glow pt. 2
That's okay to say, but why do you and Scaruffi think that?
>Scaruffi believes Pablo Honey is equal in quality to Kid A and The Glow pt. 2
that actually hurts a bit
Because he's a shameless contrarian that forms a large portion of his opinions on music on nothing other than the desire to go against the grain.
He's really not.
You're probably comparing The Seer to the rest of Swans discography when it's not trying to be like any of their other albums.
>hiding lack of ideas behind drones
Good joke, the last three Swans albums have been relatively operatic in scope in terms of content in comparison to their early work which often intentionally focused around a single simplistic riff for 10 minutes at a time.
When I heard The Seer, I thought it was amazing. Two albums later, and it feels like I could probably draw up something like The Seer in a week. The Seer, TBK, and Glowing Man may as well be one giant album called "We can take 5 minutes of ideas and make 5 hours of music".
It's pretty good, but it follows this very predictable formula, and once you realize it's all tortilla with cheese, meat, and vegetables, the interest starts to disappear. And I say this as a modern Swans/TexMex fan.
Jesus Christ it's the goddamn 21st century and people still haven't caught up to innovations in musical perceptions. At least normies have a reason as they aren't too committed to the musical medium. You don't.
What album, if any, does scaruffi agree with popular critics on?
yikes
>I could probably draw up something like The Seer in a week
yeah totally dude and I can write a chart-topping no. 1 pop song because haha jst four chords and a nursery rhyme melody right
most of their older songs werent even ten minutes long though. Sure they may be more operatic but dramatic storytelling really didnt sound like the aim of something like filth or children of god and clocking in at 30 minutes a song doesnt make it inherently more ambitious.
If anyone could've made albums like The Seer and To Be Kind, it's strange that no one did.
TVU&N
The Doors
TMR
Blonde On Blonde
Astral Weeks
Loveless
Spiderland
Have you even looked at his top list?
The Doors
>swans
DUDE REPETITION LMAO SO DEEP
let me rephrase: what recent albums, if any, does he agree with critics on
>6/8 from his youth
>2/8 created genres
Hmm, really makes you think
he explained pretty thoroughly why its not as huge of a feat as new swans fans hail it as. I dont get what youre criticizing.
promotion and exposure are just as important to pop music as simplicity and familiarity
How is it strange, you are implying others would want to make it, which implies it has some sort of value. But it doesn't. You just think it does because you bought the hype like a good little indie consumer.
Get off the board, kid.
no track on filth comes even close to the seer in terms of compositional complexity, they are all blatantly more ambitious songs
you literally can't prove him wrong
>created genres
thats funny i dont know which ones you could be talking about
Tell me how I'm wrong, modern Swans is literally repetition for about 4 minutes, then a slight change (whoa so dramatic) and more repetition for another 4 minutes, till you have a 12 minute songs, and this is repeated over a period of two fucking hours.
Joanna Newsom, Nicolas Jaar, Danny Brown, Shaking the Habitual, Julia Holter, the Archandroid, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, etc etc
You do realize how stupid it is for you to even respond? What you just typed is literal trash. Read back your paragraph and genuinely think about what you typed.
Focusing more on getting more out of the overtones is for sure more ambitious though. Something like that requires a lot of conventional forms of repetition. It's kinda what Glenn Branca was trying to achieve but with a more colorful palette of timbres and also being heavier.
Not sure if you're talking about that user or Scaurffi. But in the case of Scaruffi, yeah he mentions that Branca and Sonic Youth have done this style as well. That being said, it's different in the case of modern era Swans where it's not just the electric guitars anymore. There's a far larger variety of colorful sounds that Swans work with, and their work is also at the same time very heavy. They are literally taking how there was a variety of sounds on SFTB and combining it with Branca/Youth.
>it feels like I could probably draw up something like The Seer in a week
ok do it then buckaroo
DAMN you Swans/critic drones get quite defensive over their terrible infinite loop garbage.
read his full review and scaruffi will explain exactly why he feels that way. ultimately i disagree, but scaruffi's interpretation of later swans is by no means invalid.
youre basing that on sheer length though, structural composition aside, filth takes "unmusical" sounds and appropriates them into music thats almost even catchy at times. there may not be ten minute long passages transitioning into a climax but who the fuck would even press/release that from a brand new punk band
You can't prove him right either
And old Swans is literally repetition for four to eight minutes (whoa so dramatic) and then the song ends and more repetition for four to eight minutes till you have an album.
The point being, why pretend you like old Swans if you don't like new Swans? Repetition is an important part of their music. It's their schtick. Complaining about "modern Swans" being repetitive is fucking retarded. From day one they were doing this.
Oh, good boy :)
Have you ever considered ending yourself? Ending your life that is. The easiest way for someone young like you would be to jump from a large height.
I understand his opinion completely, but I still don't understand why he thinks he sold out
he praises all sorts of mega popular acts. off the top of my head: metallica, bob dylan, the doors, bruce springsteen, acdc, sex pistols, rolling stones, van morrison. he even has a few kind words for jimmy buffett.
>all from his youth
Wow, my noggin sure is a joggin
>mega popular acts are those that have stood the test of time
really craggles my cranium
Who said I like old Swans? I haven't listened to them.
Whoa it's almost as though music might have been better back then
>it's almost like music was better when the critic I follow was a kid
>popular bands that people Scaruffi's age still love
Wow, really trains the brain
i think that sounds cool in theory but honestly old swans seemed like getting more sounds out of less resources while new swans can drag in a gong, gamelan, harp and steel guitar but the song still seems to go into the same safe territory and just builds a wall of sound instead of evoking unfamiliar timbres and textures. they got so obsessed with deconstructing rock/pop that it just became loud moments and soft moments for the most part
URANAL
as demonstrates, he still lauds recent work that garners critical buzz. my only point is that for a work to qualify as mega popular it literally has to be old, or it may well just be a passing fad.
Scaruffi go away
What are you even trying to say?
reminder that he's french, he doesn't speak/write great english. explains a lot of his reviewing style desu
>explains a lot of his reviewing style
yeah hes too busy eating baguettes to listen to the music properly
isn't he italian?
fair point actually, the connection between the negative qualities he finds on the album and the band having sold out doesn't seem very clear. i guess he's implying that gira somehow knew the musical style of the seer would be met with such warm reception by p4k and their ilk, but again that really does seem a stretch. ultimately i'm not so concerned with the acerbic closing sentence of a review, certainly much less concerned with that than the preceding paragraphs, even if i might disagree with them. it is kind of a silly line, but whatever, i think scaruffi has justified his distaste well enough and that's all i really care about.
swans were not great before the comeback, with the exception of children of god and and their 90s work. the comeback albums are far more musical, different enough that they can't be compared directly with, say, filth, and far too out there to really be considered a sellout. their relationship/cooperation with pitchfork could be described as such, but describing the actual music as a "sellout" is lazy and inaccurate.
>The Seer is the logical continuation of Swans after Soundtracks.
I really don't see the similarities, at all. in fact they're complete opposites. the seer feels like a 2 hour meditation on an idea. soundtracks is a 2 hour compilation of jumbled ideas. not that that's a bad thing
I mean, having Karen O in your album is a pretty big red flag.
Gira is just ripping-off Branca but removing everything that makes Branca's work so amazing
>old swans seemed like getting more sounds out of less resources while new swans can drag in a gong, gamelan, harp and steel guitar but the song still seems to go into the same safe territory and just builds a wall of sound instead of evoking unfamiliar timbres and textures.
That's because their stuff like SFTB was more an attempt at variety of sounds. Such a thing isn't the aim of newer Swans stuff although it's definitely there.
Newer Swans takes inspiration from their more colorful sounds around SFTB time, takes the idea of relentless heaviness from their early days, and then adds in the Branca/Sonic Youth influence. Like a lot of Branca and Sonic Youth's music, on a surface level particularly from the perspective of melody and harmony it sounds like they are playing the exact same shit. But beyond the surface level is when one starts to hear the overtones they were trying to reach for. To be able to do something like this, there needs to be a lot of repetition, walls of sounds, and a high enough volume to capture it all. Not to mention that the records aren't even just loud/soft moments, rather they are akin to minimalist inspired works that constantly switch different sounds in and out. A person who browses /bleep/ might actually have a far easier time digesting this style of song structure than someone who's more used to just listening to rock music. I know I used to have a tougher time understanding music with subtle additions/changes like this for a while and used to think even lauded /bleep/ legends were overrated trash. It's a completely different change in perspective in terms of what to look for musically.
The ultimate result is achieving a psychoacoustic effect similar to minimalist classical composer Charlemagne Palestine (his work Strumming Music is a good start to understanding harmonic overtones, and Gira has even collabed with him.)
Yeah, I respect his opinion. But Swans selling out is completely wrong
you literally can
he's actually italian and largely influenced by marxist theories of art
that's right user. you can do anything if you set your mind to it :)
If you want it to top the charts you should suck some producer's dick, quite literally
doesn't explain his shit taste unfortunately
>explains bits and pieces of the record
>says they did nothing original citing Branca and Youth when neither approached the music in this manner
>says it sounds nothing like Swans when it still does the heavy relentless repetition of their earlier stuff while also having that pseudo-spiritual gothic feel of their post-COG work
>makes baseless accusations about the The Seer being some kind of P4K bait when the band has never cared about this stuff, and the claim makes even less sense with how ostracized that band got post-rape accusation
There are things that can be objectively proven wrong in his review of The Seer. I don't even care that if he does or doesn't like the record, but to continually claim that everything he said is justified is ridiculous. His writing's full of contradictions as usual.
want to reiterate my agreement with you on that. i do love scaruffi but he can really get ahead of himself sometimes.
the point was writing it, not achieving the same level of success. no one is disputing that there's more to the music industry than songwriting, in fact that's kind of the point the original guy was making - that it's quite easy to write songs like swans and it's the dressing that has made them successful (I disagree completely fwiw)
didnt care for it myself tbqh fam3.14
SFTB>>>>>>>>>the rest
which is why he's so entertaining there's no other critic with such hot takes
his main issues with the seer seems to be that there's a relative dearth ideas (especially relative to its length) and that these ideas are indebted to musicians like branca and sonic youth. i really don't understand how anyone can dispute these two assertions, even if you ultimately disagree, like i do, with his conclusion that they make the seer a bad record.
>there are still people who are't aware that scaruffi is just some user using a random old man's facebook photos and writing intentionally shitty reviews just to trigger Sup Forums
I hate Scaruffi because he contradicts himself for attention, makes purposely callous statements with no reasoning behind them, always shoehorns his autistic Beatles rants whenever he can.
He also strokes his own ego and bombasts his achievements without evidence (he literally made up an award for himself, "best music taste"). Lastly (not music related), he's a creepy fuck saying pedophilic things, and keeping a gigantic picture log of his people/friends ("friends of piero"). Most of them look unaware that the picture is being taken.
It's gotten to the point where I honestly believe it's all an elaborate joke by a person or a group of people.
you're a fucking moron dude
>relative dearth ideas (especially relative to its length)
Song lengths ranging from 1.5 minutes to 32 minutes, the structures of the tracks based on their time, the army of guests that show up to either do vocals or instruments, the variety of sounds that lead to each track sounding different. It makes even less sense when he goes onto describe the differences in each track, and that comparatively he has also given a record with a similar style though not as ambitious a 7/10 (330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond the Rig Veda)
>and that these ideas are indebted to musicians like branca and sonic youth
Most of Branca and Sonic Youth's experimentation with this style was limited to mostly electric guitars though. Swans go far beyond just the electric guitars on this record and their other newer ones.
He may be a ridiculous old fart, but at least I discovered many great music thanks to him.
>pablo honey equal to Kid A
he's not wrong, if you want a good version of Kid A listen to amnesiac
>the glow pt. 2
muh whiny indie band
Well that's great, but I cannot respect him as a music critic for any reason. He doesn't even listen to most albums more than once, or even finish them.
He refutes this by saying, "If you listen to an album over and over again, you'll love every album you've ever heard." Which one, is not true. Secondly, that's ridiculous to say that he has to listen to an album several times, but you can gain a new perspective or opinion on an album after at least 2 or 3 listens. Are you telling me that he listened to Trout Mask Replica one time and thought it was a 9.5? It's extremely likely that he didn't and I think he's a joke of a music critic.
>keeping a gigantic picture log of his people/friends ("friends of piero").
scaruffi.com
holy fuck you werent kidding. im convinced this guy is autistic. that's the only explanation for this compulsion to categorize literally everything.
none of this is (true, by the way). scaruffi always adequately defends his views and probably has the most consistent methodology for determining the merit of an album of all rock critics.
yes, there's variety in song length and an army of guests and etc but i have to agree with that the bigger picture seems like an extended meditation on a single idea. which i thought was gloriously transcendent, as if they were exploring every possible dimension to that idea to show just how much it can encompass and accomplish, but it's a single idea nonetheless.
swans do go beyond electric guitar, but the sound is still indebted to their style. for him that's not enough, i guess. for me it is.
What did I say that wasn't true?
It's genuinely bizarre to look at those pictures, most of them are unaware that he even took them. Like, did he get their consent of posting those pictures, for the entire internet to look at?
>He doesn't even listen to most albums more than once, or even finish them.
you're misconstruing his words. he said that he only ever fails to finish an album if it's egregiously awful (so probably about a 2 or 3 on his scale) and that he generally only gives works a single listen, which seems to imply that his highest ranking albums go through at least another relisten, probably several for his 9s. and at the end of the day, who gives a shit about the amount of times he's listened to an album if he can walk away from that experience with insightful commentary and an ability to connect it to broader fields of human expression?
>reminder that he's french
he's a guido
that he doesn't defend his views or that he contradicts himself.
>that the bigger picture seems like an extended meditation on a single idea
So...like Beefheart on Trout Mask Replica? The Doors on their self titled? That Sun City Girls album I mentioned earlier? Practically most of his highly rated records minus some exceptions like Uncle Meat or Faust I enter this category. Before you bring up song lengths again, what Swans were trying to do requires more time to pull off.
>but the sound is still indebted to their style.
Like Beefheart is indebted to blues and jazz. Faust to rock n roll and musique concrete. Etc.
Like none of these are valid. If he had consistency over his reviews, yeah sure it would make sense. But there is no such consistency. And that's the real problem here, and always the problem with the guy outside him citing things that can be proven to be objectively false (like in the beatles critique).
It's kinda baffling I am even having this discussion considering that he's only meme status here for a reason.
the seer is the best swans album
>insightful commentary and an ability to connect it to broader fields of human expression
Whatever you say, I don't agree with it in the slightest. I can't truly listen to a critic that only listens to albums once. It's my personal opinion, but I think there are more things to gain out of albums than the first listen
its not that i dont hear the change in dynamics and the subtle addition of textures in a chaotic mix, i get that theres stuff going on but it doesnt seem like much more enjoyable than the average crescendocore band when its mostly volume dynamics and a few layers of bells and feedback that drives the song forward. I admit thats an interesting approach to writing music but the product itself just feels samey especially compared to the ascension or bad moon rising/confusion is sex. abandoning melody to focus on presence is a cool idea but it leaves a void to be filled especially for songs that pass that ten minute mark, personally i dont think the seer and co fill that void besides a few nice moments. Its funny that gira can make really inspired music out of acoustic instruments in aol or tape recordings on sftb or just untuned instruments and improv percussion but once he has everything at his disposal, he just tries to throw it all together in the loudest way possible instead of really laying out an idea for how it should sound
I worded that poorly of defending his views, I intended to say that he basically says brash things without seeming any forethought (in my opinion). He poorly defends himself if anything. On the contradiction bit, he has absolutely contradicted himself in the past, just look at his bjork reviews.
well yes, all music ultimately deals with a limited set of ideas and is indebted to certain styles. discussions of merit and originality and etc are thus about degrees. scaruffi contends that the seer had few ideas, and, perhaps most importantly, these ideas were mostly derivative of other acts. he clearly disagrees when it comes to all of those other albums you mentioned, especially about the latter point.
also categories like 'blues,' 'jazz,' 'rock n roll,' and 'musique concrete' are far more expansive than individual acts like branca and sonic youth.
you can listen to whichever critics you want to listen to, but to me, the idea that the paramount value of a critic lies in the amount of times they've listened to an album, rather than what they have to say about the album, is ridiculous. are you telling me that if you came across a review of an album that articulated its virtues and vices in a way 100% agreeable to you, but found out it was written after only a single listen, you would disregard it?
almost all of these things can vaguely describe your average Sup Forums poster
i think how attentively and actively you listen is more important than how many times you listen but i do agree that most people wont absorb a lot of whats going on just listening how they normally do
he's certainly bold in his style, can't disagree with that. but that's one of the things i appreciate about him; would you really prefer a meek critic who has to constantly equivocate in his views? i don't really think he poorly defends himself either. his reviews for low-scored albums tend to be a bit lacking, but if you read his 8+ reviews they're universally thoughtful, provided they've been translated. what about his bjork review do you find contradictory?
the three b's of scaruffi that constitute his appeal
brevity - stays succinct; doesnt analyze lyrics
boldness - doesn't hesitate to pan popular albums
breadth - i cant think of another critic who's reviewed as much music
I never once said that the times a critic listens to an album is more important to what they say, but that makes me highly skeptical of what they say since they are analyzing the album, what it does well, what it does poorly, how unique it is, what it is influenced by, what it influences, etc... I'm saying you can understand or have a more justified opinion about an album with more than one listen.
If a music critic "articulated an album's virtues and vices in a way 100% agreeable to me. But they say they have listened to it once." Then sure, I would regard it. But I have yet to see that, therefore I don't but it. It's purely hypothetical.
I don't listen to what people have to say on Sup Forums. Listen, what they say is more important than how many times they listen to it, in my opinion, I am highly skeptical because you can get a more justified opinion and analysis of an album out of more than one listen.
all of which is your prerogative, then. i'm going to agree with that a single attentive and active listen always beats multiple passive listens, and contend that even if scaruffi does mostly only bother with single listens, his writings reflect that they've been attentive/active.
apologies if i misconstrued your views; i'm drunk and a bit prone to hysterics in this state.
That's another aspect of Scaruffi that I'm skeptical of, how has he listened to like thousands of albums, watched thousands of movies, read thousands of books, traveled the world, wrote essays/novels, write the reviews, worked his software job etc...? I get that he's old, but there's an element of disbelief