Swans Are Alive

I went to see Swans in Brixton. Normally I am used to being surrounded by middle-aged men at these things – Swans have been active since 1982, though not in quite the same form – but here everyone standing around me was a kid. Luckily everyone on the stage probably was older than me, with the exception of bassist Chris Pravdica, and he's balder. Arguably.

Not that I cared anyway – you get like that as you get older. I was unselfconscious enough to wear earplugs I got free many years ago with my subscription to The Wire magazine (Adventures in Modern Music). Back then it seemed perverse for a music magazine to be giving out earplugs, and even more perverse to be shoving them in just as the band I've come expressly to listen to starts up. But after all it's just the aural equivalent of safe sex - Swans are notoriously loud – and all the young people seemed to be wearing them too.

Unless they were hearing aids, and they were more hardcore than I thought. Some were headbanging after a fashion – or nodding violently, at least.

The earplugs immediately created a cosy ambient fug around me in which people's irritating conversations were dissolved, and I wasn't conscious of missing out when the band started – I could hear them and I could feel them. The set was nothing new, but that doesn't mean it wasn't experimental or forward-moving: it was just old, as in primeval. A throbbing miasma of sound building to crescendoes with which the band were possibly trying to summon some entity that would finally allow them entry into Hell, or Heaven. Lead singer Michael Gira stumbled about with a beatific smile of his face like a prematurely-aged child, drunk on noise. When he and Pravdica faced each other, brandishing their guitars, they appeared to me as dinosaurs wanking furiously at each other over a primordial swamp.

I hadn't yet got my head around the album, which is so long you need to book an appointment to listen to it. Their first album was called Filth; this is called To Be Kind. Something has changed, then, though it isn't quite a mellowing, unless it's a very intense mellowing. Nevertheless, I get the impression that something life-affirming - joyous even - has drifted into their sound, previously often characterised as a punishing grind. The performance confirmed this. As I left someone handed me a leaflet saying 'Eat Your Own Ears', as if after this experience, nothing else remained to be done with them.