SUMMARY:

• Rating: 3.5/10

• Favorite: “Raping A Slave”

• Least Favorite: “This Is Mine”

REVIEW:

After my relatively disappointing revisit of Cop, I expected to detest its even slower-paced little brother Young God. That isn’t quite what happened, but this EP still left me feeling quite conflicted. It started out surprisingly strong with the immersively oppressive “I Crawled”, before the even more engaging follow-up “Raping A Slave” came along and got me even more invested. The first half of this miniature record illustrates an apocalyptic microcosm, with each gargled scream that scrapes across the grotesque soundscape detailing the corners of a hellish, rotting world. These tracks aren’t masterpieces, but they felt legitimately interesting in a way that I hadn’t remembered from my very first attempt to digest this EP a few months ago. However, the reasons for my sour predisposition towards this record became clear one again as I made it into the second pair of songs. Similarly to its predecessor, neither track from this selection is “bad” on its own, but they lost the bits of nuance that made the previous 12 minutes feel worthwhile. Aside from the unexpected dynamic shift at the end of “Young God” and the relatively unique vocal delivery on “This Is Mine”, this now-familiar vibe of slow-motion brutality quickly overstayed its welcome, and I ended up feeling tired and disinterested by the end in spite of its short runtime. I surprised even myself by the quick turnaround of opinion that I had during this listen, so I gave it another shot later that day, and I ended up already waiting for the EP to be over before its first track even concluded. If anything, Young God has made me appreciate Cop more for its sonic diversity despite its crucially inconsistent tempo, although I would still only give it an extra 0.5-1.0 points rather than a whole reevaluation. Overall, I’m glad that this is the final primary release of Swans’ pure no-wave era, because I don’t think I would’ve stuck around for much longer if I had to keep subjecting myself to increasingly self-defeating exercises in misery. The raw negative emotions and horrific past experiences that Gira was expressing throughout this phase of their careers was still genuine, but the artistic lengths he went to reflect them had diminishing returns in terms of legitimately engaging music.