SWANS Vinyl & CDs

Review: Public Castration Is A Good Idea is one of the rare instances of a bootleg instantly becoming part of a band's canon. As Michael Gira's Swans grew in stature on the outer edges of industrial rock through the 80s, their reputation as an incendiary live act rose in tandem. Some Bizarre gave their blessing to this recording which wound up as the first Swans live album, captured in the UK in 1986 in the wake of the Greed and Holy Money tours. It's a forbidding listen, as you might well expect - all clanking metal, barbed noise and Gira's troubled invocations - and it takes you right to the heart of the band in this formative era.

Review: Loudest rock band in the world? Possibly. At one point? Definitely. Feel Good Now certainly proves the theory, with the second live album from Swans, recorded during their 1987 Children of God tour, capturing some of the zeitgeist of seeing them in the flesh. The fact all this was captured using a Sony Professional Walkman only emphasises just how much zeitgeist there was to capture. Remastered for this edition, fans of the grit and heaving atmosphere that came with the original will be glad to know that all the 21st Century bells, whistles, and high tech restoration couldn't make this one sound clean. And we mean that in the best possible way. Running through monstrous track after monstrous track, even heard through the other side of 25 years and without a massive venue rig, it's impossible not to pick up on the sense of immersion that has always defined Swans.