Swans first emerged in early-‘80s NYC as part of the brief, avant-garde “No Wave” scene: a fringe of abrasive contrarians who dismissed not only New Wave but even Punk Rock as too mainstream^[1]And this back when Punk was still considered a subversive genre. Yet even within No Wave, Swans was considered especially ugly and confrontational: playing at painfully-loud volumes, stepping on audience fingers that touched the stage, pulling their hair, physically assaulting head-bangers, shutting off the venue’s A/C to mimic a Native American sweat lodge, and etc.

Hence the irony that Swans was one of the few No Wave bands to survive the scene and enjoy some real longevity^[2]Along with Sonic Youth, incidentally, who did go on to score some mainstream crossover hits in the early-90s, even recording a video in 1987 that is inescapably ‘80s. They also became gradually more melodic and dynamic as the ’80s and ’90s progressed; like the animals they were named for, Swans strove to be as majestic as they were vicious. But one cannot make abrasive noise-rock forever, and so in 1997 Swans officially broke up so that frontman Michael Gira could experiment with quiet, acoustic music instead.^[3]As almost every aging musician tends to do.

Eventually however, Gira couldn’t resist his urge to explore expansive soundscapes again, and so reformed Swans in 2010, touring with the same antagonistic energy of old. He also got right to work on their massive, 2-hour comeback album The Seer (released in the Mayan apocalypse year of 2012). The critically-acclaimed LP opens with the absolute barn-burner “Lunacy,”^[4]Which also featured in the teaser-trailer for the 2015 film version of “Macbeth.” featuring harmonies from none other than Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker of Low.

At first blush, this pairing of Swans with Low seems rather jarring; as this site has catalogued way too many times before, Low was very famously quiet, spare, minimalist, gentle, lovely–and, you know, Mormon. Yes, they had begun expanding into amplifiers and distortion in the mid-2000s, but never anything to the scale of Swans^[5]Certainly Low had never stamped on people’s fingers, pulled their hair, or cut the A/C.

But that’s not to say Low never antagonized their audiences, either: in their earliest shows, for example, when they were still playing before raucous Punk crowds who demanded some noise, they would purportedly respond by turning the volume down even lower. Once in 2013, when invited to perform a set at a music festival, they pissed off everyone by just performing their 1996 drone-jam “Do You Know How To Waltz?” for 30 minutes. Their various late-period experiments with hard rock, electronica, and industrial grooves also thumbed their noses at those who’d fallen in love with their early slow-core. Overall, Low frequently enjoyed challenging and provoking their audiences as much as Swans did, just in a more understated manner.

For that matter, Swans was never just abrasive for abrasiveness’ sake, but had always married it together with a strong sense of ethics and humanity: their earliest lyrics, for example, contain blunt critiques of power, exploitation, domination, and oppression, because these are the things dehumanizing us. Like D&C 121, Swans intuits “that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.” Hence why many are called, but few are chosen.

Overall, if Swans is abrasive, it is because the human condition itself is abrasive, and they are angrily pushing back against it. And if Swans lyrics are also frequently critical of religion (the album in question is entitled The Seer, after all), well, theirs is not the smug condescension of the sarcastic atheist^[6]His second band was called Angels of Light—a reference to Satan, of course, but still a sincere religious allusion., but the righteous fury of some Enoch or Elijah, wherein “a wild man hath come among us”. Like Christ Himself, Gira preaches apocalyptic doom to a generation of hypocrites and vipers, one that, in our myriad cruelties both petty and gross, have uniformly failed to comprehend just how massive religion really is–and how much it will crush us if we keep on crushing each other. If the Church had not already copyrighted the term “Latter-day Saints,” such could double as the title of a late-period Swans album. From this perspective, the pairing together of Swans and Low isn’t so strange after all.

Take also the opening lines to “Lunacy” itself:

“In the mind of no one
Forming sun, forming love
Break the chain, hide within
Innocence, not innocent
Innocent, in no sense
Eat the beast, keep him in
Take the blame, speak the name

Lunacy, lunacy
Lunacy, lunacy

Hide beneath your monkey skin
Feel his love, nurture him
Kill the truth or speak the name…”

In these spare lines, we see an emphasis on “forming love” and “Break[ing] chains;” on overcoming the natural man (“Eat the beast, keep him in” and “Hide beneath your monkey skin”); of learning to “take the blame”, that is, confess our sins and repent; on how the choice is between “Kill the truth” or “speak the name” that will save you–that is, between lies and repentance.

What, then, is the titular “Lunacy?” It is that we would rather kill the truth than speak it; that we would rather feign “innocence” rather than actually become “innocent” of the blood and sins of this generation; that rather than redeem our “monkey skin” with the same divine love that formed the suns and the universe and even our bodies forged from the carbon of exploding stars, that we would rather die in our sins.

The song finishes with the repeated mantra of, “Your childhood is over…” Here lies the hardest part: that in order to do the things that will save us, we must, as ever, “become as little children.” But that is so much harder to do when you are no longer a child. It requires something greater than our natural selves to accomplish. It requires the foresight of a Seer.

And it is here where we must inevitably address the album name in question, because such possesses rather unique LDS valences as well. As Mosiah 8 reads:

15 And the king said that a seer is greater than a prophet.

16 And Ammon said that a seer is a revelator and a prophet also; and a gift which is greater can no man have, except he should possess the power of God, which no man can; yet a man may have great power given him from God.

17 But a seer can know of things which are past, and also of things which are to come, and by them shall all things be revealed, or, rather, shall secret things be made manifest, and hidden things shall come to light, and things which are not known shall be made known by them, and also things shall be made known by them which otherwise could not be known.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m reasonably certain Michael Gita only named it The Seer because it sounds cool^[7]As though he needed a better reason; Alan and Mimi however were perhaps attracted to the project^[8]Beyond the pleasure of working with an old No Wave legend, I mean. due to their understanding of a Seer being something both beyond and constitutive of the highest office of the Church. This faith claims to have been founded by a Seer; it sustains its current president as one.

Yet Mosiah 8 is also literally the only place in The Book of Mormon wherein the word Seer appears; such seems to imply that even the faith’s keystone considers a Seer to be something rare, exceptional, even terrifying. Implicitly, if all seers are also a prophets, not all prophets are seers; certainly President Oaks seemed to so indicate when he said in Conference that he’s not aware of any present member of the Q15 who’s had a personal vision of the Almighty—or, in response to a member’s question of what eternal polygamy looks like, simply said we have no idea what the next life really looks like yet. Such D&C76-style revelations are reserved for seers like Joseph Smith; Oaks may be a Prophet by virtue of “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy”^[9]Revelations 19:10—just as we are all small-p prophets due to our witness by the Holy Ghost—but a Seer is something even more, something rare.

It is something that, I dare say, we all secretly desire for ourselves—to no longer see through a glass darkly, to (like the brother of Jared) have faith no longer, but know, nothing doubting—yet like the three Nephites before the resurrected Savior, we dare not ask for it directly. Yet though we feel it a sin in our faith to seek after an honor we have not received, still the yearning is there, and is real. Perhaps the point of the story of the Three Nephites isn’t to fuel our regional folktales, but to reassure us that it is not a sin to desire it for ourselves. And perhaps the reason why Alan and Mimi appeared on Swans’ comeback record is because they had that same sincere, childlike desire for themselves.