Swans – My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (2010)

November 15, 2024

Like a transitional album with many elements from Gira’s previous project, The Angels Of Light. I bought the 12″ of this at a Swans show in Cardiff in 2010 and I swear there was like 50 people there. It was crazy seeing them in the following year (We Rose / Proto-Seer era) and how much their sound and audience had developed. I was really gobsmacked!

Anyway, My Father… has some incredible songs on it, namely the campfire hum of “Reeling The Liars In”, or the harder hitting “My Birth” or “Eden Prison”. The record has a warm and truly “American” sound to it, for as ridiculous as that sounds.

It definitely lives in the shadow of the trilogy of albums that followed it but I have a soft-spot for this as it was the first record I ever owned by the band. For me, and I’m sure many others, it was the start of a journey both wonderful and strange.