MANCHESTER, Tenn. â€" Hearing Swans toward the end of Bonnaroo on a day of ominous weatherâ€"a hot blue Sunday afternoon suddenly turned stone-grey and windy, with the threat of a stormâ€"makes you understand how much this festival needs its intermittent shots of sublime dread.
Can nearly all music be sweet and groovy once you put the Bonnaroo frame around it? Seemingly so: Kendrick Lamar’s in-the-club social-realism, Baroness’s southern metal, Dirty Projectors’ chopped and stuttering rhythm, Cat Power’s sad and strange ballads, Action Bronson’s syntactically rugged rapping, the banjoist Noam Pikelny’s nerdy post-bluegrass, Bjork and Paul McCartney and Tom Petty. Swans came through with grooves, in a way. But they refused to be groovy, and that felt like healthy dissent.
They were cycles, often of one kind of note and one kind of chord hit hard and long and broadly, building up in symphonic chants, timbres of steel guitar and tubular bells and trombones and electric guitars all sharing space, notes and beats repeated with ritual intensity.
Michael Gira, the New York band’s singer, guitarist, and songwriter, reanimated Swans three years ago after a 13-year layoff; he promised that the band’s second life wouldn’t be sentimental, trading on old victories, and he has kept his promise. It was a remarkable set with some new and very long songsâ€"one borrowed some lyrics from the Cramps’ “Garbageman†â€" in which Mr. Gira gradually moved away from his dry baritone toward a more physical, percussive, punctuating kind of singing. This version of Swans sounded solid from the start in 2010, but it’s growing more special. It often feels like an act of generosity, or at least an outpouring, but it retains its fortresslike quality, its sense of not becoming common emotional property.
The set was loud and intense and methodical, with Mr. Gira’s lyrics as commands or incantations; it drove some people away, just as in the old days of the group. Of course that would happen here, an enormous festival without a common aesthetic. (There were seven other bands playing at the same time on different stages, as well as Bob Saget in the comedy tent, telling genitalia jokes at the speed of light.) But the people I saw rejecting it didn’t do so categorically, in five or 10 minutes. They rejected it after 30 or 40, admitting defeat.
