Swans / Baby Dee @ Le National (Pop Montreal)

The cool kids get all the credit. Soundtracks for the Blind, Swans' "final" record from 1994, seemed to create a new sonic universe just in time for the band to implode - over two hours, it employed 15-minute epics (particularly "Helpless Child," a song that may or may not have helped invent vocal post-rock), ambient pieces, and experimental works often driven by distressing bits of found sound. It changed the listening habits of many who heard it, yours truly included, but the band are often thought of as simply 1980s goth industrialists. Yes, their work touched on industrial, but also on metal, folk, art-rock, and the avant-garde (particularly for the era that included second vocalist Jarboe). Now, after a 15-year hiatus, bandleader Michael Gira, who has since labored under the name Angels of Light, has decided to partially reassemble the group and start the Swans mission over. The resulting first recording, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, is one of the year's best records, a ferocious, funny and scary masterwork that rivals some of the band's best work.

Opener Baby Dee was a mildly incongruous choice. An avant-blues-folk harpist with an extremely polarizing vocal technique, Dee immediately set out to set the crowd at ease in the face of her deeply eccentric tunes. "No one's ever just stopped me and said, you know, you stink," she implored, "so I want everyone to chant with me: 'your music stinks, and you stink!'" It was a request some of the more restless members of the audience were all too happy to comply with, particularly those with less enlightened views towards her hermaphroditism (thanks, Montreal), but her songs do possess a certain charm. She's a gifted harpist, and her arrangements (a young violinist and cellist joined her onstage) are often ingenious, but I confess a certain indifference towards her particularly affected brand of freak-folk, even as I applaud her winning stage presence and obvious talent.

Despite My Father's generally agreed-upon strength, some greeted the new Swans tour with skepticism - after all, the former incarnation of Swans was known as one of the most intense live acts of all time, blending punishing volume with Gira's emotional intensity for a singular experience. They needn't have worried. My Father's opener, "No Words/No Thoughts," is already a hulking ten-minute behemoth on record, but it grew into something even more cataclysmic onstage. Before the band even appeared, the mics were turned on and allowed to generate subtly shifting feedback for minutes, until finally multi-instrumentalist Thor Harris (also of Angels of Light and Shearwater) took to the bells to knock out a complex, cyclic melody by his lonesome for at least another five minutes, creating a deep sense of hypnosis. Finally, the other five member joined him, launching into the song's huge stop-start groove. Gira was in fine form, bellowing out with his usual foreboding tone like a man possessed and undaunted by the sheer wall of noise mounting behind him. The song's third section, a bass-driven, mosh-worthy breakdown, signaled a complete assault, with Gira's guitar combining with Christoph Hans' steel strings to demolish the eardums of anyone who dared come too close. (Fearing exactly this outcome, I opted for the balcony before their set even began.)

After that gargantuan, 20-25 minute endeavor, they could very well have left the stage and satisfied just about everyone, but their work wasn't done. They continued to hammer out a good chunk of My Father, as well as throwing in a surprising set of oldies, altogether ditching their late-'80s-early-'90s material - essentially, nothing from the Jarboe era. As that's the period with which I am most familiar, that might have been a disappointment, but Gira and co. were so on-point it hardly mattered. From new tunes like "Eden Prison," "Jim" and especially the self-loathing anthem "My Birth," to oldies like Cop's "Your Property" to Children of God's "Sex, God, Sex," they proved Gira's claim that this was a restatement of purpose rather than just a reunion. Swans are not dead; long live Swans.