SWANS — Cop (review)

SWANS — Cop album cover Album · 1984 · Metal Related Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Warthur
Swans take doom metal riffs, post-punk production and disturbing lyrics and sort of mash them up into an unbelievably ugly gumbo on Cop, their second album. Howling about police brutality, heartache, jobs and violence, frontman Michael Gira is backed by riffs that sound like the world's roof falling in. Pegged by some as noise rock (and good golly is it noisy), I personally see it as a precedent for Black Flag's latter-day experiments in slowing their riffs down and getting weird (see, for instance, The Process of Weeding Out).

Just about saved from doom metal territory by virtue of a complete lack of 1970s nostalgia or stoner pipe dreams, Cop is a cold, hard look at an ugly reality, and like ugly reality it's hard to confront. It's one of those albums which is intentionally hard to listen to, like much work also being produced by Swans' industrial and no-wave peers. However, there's a fine line between being uncomfortable to listen to in a cool, atmospheric way and being uncomfortable to listen to in an irritating way, and like Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, the early Swans efforts - Cop very much included - end up sitting directly on that line.
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