Pete Swanson - I Don't Rock At All

(Three Lobed Recordings, 2011)

Pete Swanson is no stranger around these parts.  His work as half of Yellow Swans--particularly with their last few albums--is among the most convincing evidence that gritty, mottled darkness can simultaneously breathe blurred light and strangely shadowy beauty.  I Don't Rock At All is similarly amazing--blurry light flashing throughout--and similarly dense--evoking many shades of beauty settling in among multitudinous nooks and crannies--but I don't think I would describe it as dark.  Architecting I Don't Rock At All, Swanson has taken it up himself to knock out a few exterior walls and broom-hole some additional sky lights into the ceiling.  And the results are electric: guitar scraps stacking and swirling together like sediment: Swanson's mode finds a chaotic kinship with sometimes collaborator, Karl Bauer, and his work as Axolotl, not that they hadn't shared an audience before, but in the way that I Don't Rock At All digs into a quasi-spiritualism that feels ancient and bizarre but also filled with a wonderfully skewed sense of deliverance.  Suffice it to say that it is essential.  Believe it.

pete swanson - i don’t rock at all (album preview) by experimedia