Swans – Public Castration Is A Good Idea (1986)

April 10, 2019

Now this is a heavy one! I sold this record today (at the time of writing) so in honour of departing with one of my most cherished possessions (honestly, it deserves a better home where it will be played / appreciated and not just shoved in a box somewhere) I gave this one a play through for the first time in years.

It is easy to under-estimate how skull-rattlingly heavy the tracks on this record are. Swans’ already tortured hymns are drawn out to breaking point here; stretching out into droning slabs of industrial noise. The opening 12-minute reworking of “Money Is Flesh” just makes me wish I was around for Swans’ early days. Those live performances must have been absolutely crushing.