The question that people have not been asking themselves is this: "Is an artist just doing what they normally do worthy of acclaim?" Music history would tell us no: an artist should bring new understanding, new ideas in order to receive acclaim. Mozart and Haydn were not acclaimed for having tuneful music (quite the contrary, often!). They were acclaimed for their breaking of conventions, for Haydn's near-avant-garde experiments with the symphony and the string quartet and for Mozart's tremendously long, technical, and expansive works throughout his late period (in ADDITION to playing with formal procedures). Similarly, composers through Medieval times through the present all strove to present new ideas. And, yes, even in popular music the **new** has been what defines the great and memorable artists.
The Glowing Man has no new ideas from Swans. Certainly it is more chant-like than either The Seer or To Be Kind, but in style and form it is essentially the same: repetitious grooves with a gradual crescendo of sound. It's clear on this album that Gira has run out of ideas. This isn't even the case of Radiohead, where there are clearly new ideas at play but the energy to present them in lacking. This is a frontman who has been in music for 30 years and is feeling drained of creativity.
There's nothing wrong with this: Steve Reich's recent compositions (roughly 2006 to the present) have been lackluster, and ever since Glass left minimalism he went straight in the trash. But they do what they do, people like it, and that's the end of it.
But not so for Swans!
No, we have people who think "by-the-numbers" is high art, worthy of praise. These same people likely give the latest Max Richter or Colin Stetson albums high marks for naught more than "I like these artists and they're doing what they always do." So therefore, people who don't care about art in a historical sense.