My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky

Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky
Critic Score
Based on 26 reviews
2010 Ratings: #54 / 924
Year End Rank: #44
User Score
2010 Rank: #179
Liked by 132 people
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CRITIC REVIEWS

100
Loud and Quiet
The most well-crafted and terrifying album I’ve heard this year.
100
A.V. Club
The full-length is the group’s first since 1996, and although singer-keyboardist Jarboe is absent, Gira and longtime guitarist Norman Westberg have sired a leviathan of an album.
100
No Ripcord

Part mind numbing, part infuriating, part stimulating and always worth discussion, Swans remain a significant force in underground and independent music and this new album sees the No Wave merge with the compositionally avant-garde.

90
Tiny Mix Tapes

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To the Sky, from the title’s evocation of righteous death on down to its suffusion with keening strings and other touches of sonic Americana, is an attempt to come to terms with the dark heart of history, with that ultimate question: if we are born into crime and monstrous darkness, how do we become more than that past?

90
PopMatters

Whatever the case, we finally have My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky to judge, and—whatever baggage it might carry—what a gift it turns out to be.

90
NME
It's been a 14 year wait, but Swans unleash a chaotic melee of noise as beautiful as it is ferocious.
90
FACT Magazine
At all points it sounds exactly like Michael Gira, and just like Swans, but never sounds like any already-existing Swans record. Comebacks shouldn’t be this good, this confident. They certainly never sound this fresh.
85
The 405

What My Father does is not so much mark a return but a synthesis of previous Swans incarnations, a sort of Voltron album for the venerable experimental band.

84
Coke Machine Glow

If My Father doesn’t quite achieve the perfection (what else can you call it?) of their last albums, it nevertheless takes up where they left off.

80
Drowned in Sound

Yet My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky sounds more like the essence of Michael Gira than the Angels Of Light ever did, and ought to also serve as another broadside to the idea of reformations being inherently grubby and uncreative ventures.

80
Classic Rock
A geography-teacher style mark out of 10 or an Argos catalogue-length assessment are both insufficient to convey the complexity and brooding majesty of this work.
80
Mojo
Thirteen years after they retired Swans return with thunderous tour de force.
80
Uncut
Dig deeper, though, and what we have here is a record more in line with the excellent, vengeful Americana of frontman Michael Gira's latter-day Angels Of Light fare.
80
Slant Magazine
Darkness is still in great supply throughout these eight long songs.
80
Sputnikmusic
Swans return, bigger and more frightening than ever.
80
SPIN
Recognizable shapes of jazz and post-rock often accompany Gira’s baritone croon, but they’re always delivered between passages of fastidiously crafted clamor that’s as cauterizing as ever.
80
AllMusic

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky is a mercilessly intense and beautiful record that only Swans could pull off, and that no matter who plays in the band, Gira was and is Swans: their sound, their musical and poetic vision, their heartbeat.

77
Pitchfork

This album is the antithesis of 2010's gooey let's-all-be-friends chillwave fun.

75
Prefix
This music, though, it’s almost anti-music in spots. In a good way. It strips away all the comforting structures we know and leaves us awash in harsh emotion.
74
Spectrum Culture

Doesn’t matter that he’s 56 years old, Gira hasn’t lost his ingenious Sidam Touch. Just as always, he spins arbitrary styles and instrumentation into casual entropy, Father being the optimistic example that, yes, bands can reconvene and as record as if they never broke up.

70
musicOMH

This is certainly, then, not an album to be taken lightly. Whilst this may be its chief difficulty, and one that will undoubtedly deter and daunt some listeners, it is nevertheless good to have a band and an artist with this darkly poetic a vision back recording and performing once again.

60
The Skinny

In the context of Swans latter output, My Father… is typically challenging, with the lead-heavy opener No Words/No Thoughts treading over nine minutes of distorted abstraction; mixing imperial, instrumental ascents with Gira’s shadowed vocals. It’s a polarizing gambit, and a sure sign that Swans have returned with an uncompromising (and nihilistic) intent.

60
NOW Magazine

Swans, who emerged from the same noise-filled no wave scene in New York's early 80s as Thurston Moore, had a rotating cast of nasty-tempered psychotic rockers, with multi-instrumentalist Michael Gira at its centre. Listening to Swans' new album, the first in 14 years, you get the sense that some of that malevolence remains.

60
The Needle Drop
I think with another LP, it's the rockier moments that will come off stronger than the acoustic ones. Because as of this point, the latter is the more memorable on this LP.
60
Kerrang!
It's an album that draws on blues and gospel alongside atmospheric art-rock to end up somewhere intriguing, unnerving and frequently overwhelming.
60
Q Magazine

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky isn't all cranium-crushing bleakness, just mostly.

BradTasteMusic
82

Edit: way better than I remember

Took me 2 years to listen to this because I was so attached to Swans other work

It’s gucci

Some songs here are amazing and definitely worth coming back to. Some songs felt a bit too stripped back, but it was overall a positive experience. I enjoyed it front to back, but maybe front a bit more.

StygianHollow
70

All I can do while listening to this is imagine how insane it would have been for a Swans fan at the time, especially after 14 years of complete inactivity. It's certainly overshadowed a lot by the trilogy, but it's still a pretty damn solid LP, and has some amazing and very powerful moments on it for sure. This album is the underdog of Swans.

Favourite tracks: ★ No Words / No Thoughts, Inside Madeline, Eden Prison

ST4T1C
85

"MFWGMUARTTS" is Swans return after nearly 2 decades of radio silence after "SFTB". And while it does at certain points it does feel like Gira and the gang trying to get back into the swing of things on tracks like "My Birth" and "Reeling The Liars In", but apart from those tracks, this was a really great comeback album! The noisier tracks are just as great as they've been on previous albums, and the more folky acoustic cuts on here, while not as ... read more

AnotherWhiteMan
80

White man approved.

woodge
79

my only note is that Inside Madeline and Eden Prison are incredible

Jimshair46
80

Swans Review #14 "My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky" Album

Pretty much Mumford and Sons. This much better than I remember. Jim is so good.

Liked Tracks: No Words / No Thoughts, Reeling The Liars In, Jim, My Birth, Inside Madeline, Eden Prison

Favourite Track: Jim

Worst Track: Little Mouth

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