Swans has endured a few iterations over the course of its decades-long existence, with each seemingly exhibiting a darker shade of grey — and their most recent release The Glowing Man was emphasized by front-man Michael Gira as signaling a precursor to a third (major) iteration that will purportedly feature a “revolving cast of collaborators.” In other words, the relatively static lineup that was inaugurated in 2010 has been dissolved, and during such times of temporary artistic instability, the impulse toward oeuvre reflection seems hard to avoid. And today, it’s the the 1996 Swans album Soundtracks for the Blind that gets the attention of our backward-looking eyes.
Soundtracks was the last album before a new iteration as well; and as such, it features, in addition to Gira, the long lost (but not forgotten) Jarboe, Clint Steele, Norman Westberg, Algis Kizys, Bill Rieflin, Christoph Hahn, and Larry Lame, among others. The album is getting its first vinyl reissue on July 20 courtesy of Gira’s Young God Records, and it’ll come in the form of a box set containing four LPs, a poster, an insert, and a download card. This lavish box will be limited to 4000 copies, though; and once those are exhausted, a gatefold LP will come out to satisfy any stragglers.
Additionally, because some people still lurve CDs, the aforementioned box set is being accompanied by a CD reissue, which’ll come with the 1996 EP Die Tür Ist Zu (a German language version of some of the songs from Soundtracks that, coincidentally, was just released for the first time on vinyl in the US for Record Store Day 2018) as a bonus disc.
Swans tends to traffic in epics, and Soundtracks is — uh, duh — no exception. Pre-order the new iterations of the album here and reacquaint yourself with the nature of that particular bygone era of Swans epic-ness down below.
Soundtracks for the Blind tracklisting:
Disc One (Silver)
01. Red Velvet Corridor
02. I Was A Prisoner In Your Skul
03. Helpless Child
04. Live Through Me
05. Yum-Yab Killers
06. The Beautiful Days
07. Volcano
08. Mellothumb
09. All Lined Up
10. Surrogate 2
11. How They Suffer
12. Animus
Disc Two (Copper)
01. Red Velvet Wound
02. The Sound
03. Her Mouth Is Filled With Honey
04. Blood Section
05. Hypogirl
06. Minus Something
07. Empathy
08. I Love You This Much
09. YRP
10. Fan’s Lament
11. Secret Friends
12. The Final Sacrifice
13. YRP 2
14. Surrogate Drone
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