saw them in ljubljana two days ago, was right next to the stage, in front of chris acctualy, i could feel how the bass made the hair on my arms move and if i looked up or opened my mouth i felt it in my throat, a beautiful and unsettling feeling
There's a version of Swans playing Coward in Ljubljana in 1986 on Kill The Child, and the full show can be found here:ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-wnKVABTaliA.html @@levvercic4324
This is the first time in my entire life I'd describe a song as being my 'drug'. Not in a cringy, hyperbolic expression of enjoyment sense, but in a self-medicating sense. Listening to this exact version of Coward is like aspirin... makes the bad stuff in my head go away
So these guys won't be playing the Super Bowl at halftime? Imagine thousands of plebians wishing it was Aerosmith instead,while dropping their Bud Lights!
Personally I disagree. The old version is angry and intense, and working from a place of desperation. You can't have desperation without a belief in the existence of hope to contrast with it. This 2013 version on the other hand is just utterly insane. It lies outside the realms of a man's ability to reason at all.
This new live version seems to be drawing more on the heavier sound of Filth and Cop. The ultra-slow Public Castration version and spooky album version are both ominous in a really different way to this version.
The original studio version is pretty eerie, while the Public Castration version is as torturous as any other track on that album. I think these recent live versions have really dialed into the rhythmic heaviness factor more akin to Filth or Cop. This is just a pure repeater-riff pummeling.
