Music / Soundtracks for the Blind

"I see them all lined up..."

Soundtracks for the Blind is the tenth studio album by experimental rock band Swans.

Even for this band, this album is known to be an outlier in their catalogue for its heavy use of field recordings, various sudden and abrupt shifts of genre, and the band's first true case of Epic Rocking that they would become infamous for on later albums, featuring their first 10+ minute tracks to appear on a studio album.

Released on October 22, 1996, this was originally intended to be their final studio album before their breakup the following year. While they did indeed reunite in 2010 to further experimentation and further success, the blueprints for much of their seminal post-reunion works can be found in this album.

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Tracklist:

Silver Disc:

1. "Red Velvet Corridor" (3:04)
2. "I Was a Prisoner in Your Skull" (6:39)
3. "Helpless Child" (15:47)
4. "Live Through Me" (2:32)
5. "Yum-Yab Killers" (5:07)
6. "The Beautiful Days" (7:49)
7. "Volcano" (5:18)
8. "Mellothumb" (2:46)
9. "All Lined Up" (4:48)
10. "Surrogate 2" (1:52)
11. "How They Suffer" (5:52)
12. "Animus" (10:41)

Copper Disc:

1. "Red Velvet Wound" (2:02)
2. "The Sound" (13:11)
3. "Her Mouth Is Filled with Honey" (3:19)
4. "Blood Section" (2:39)
5. "Hypogirl" (2:44)
6. "Minus Something" (4:14)
7. "Empathy" (6:45)
8. "I Love You This Much" (7:23)
9. "YRP" (7:47)
10. "Fan's Lament" (1:28)
11. "Secret Friends" (3:08)
12. "The Final Sacrifice" (10:27)
13. "YRP 2" (2:09)
14. "Surrogate Drone" (2:06)

Tropes featured within this album:

• Album Intro Track: "Red Velvet Corridor" effectively serves this purpose, a short ambient piece right at the start of the first disc.
• Boléro Effect: The four 10+ minute tracks, "I Was a Prisoner in Your Skull" and "YRP" are more or less Trope Codifiers for this trope alongside Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
• Breather Episode: "Live Through Me", which comes between the truly draining "Helpless Child" and the brutal "Yum Yab Killers", is a short instrumental with an almost inspiring and hopeful melody.
• Drone of Dread: "Red Velvet Corridor", "How They Suffer", and "Surrogate Drone" are all very creepy dark ambient pieces.
• Epic Rocking: The album itself is a whopping 2 hours and 21 minutes, Swans' longest studio album to date.
  • "Helpless Child", "Animus", "The Sound" and "The Final Sacrifice" all exceed 10 minutes.
  • Lesser examples include "I Was a Prisoner in Your Skull", "The Beautiful Days", "Empathy", "I Love You This Much" and "YRP".
• Genre Roulette: This album goes all over the place, featuring sprawling Post-Rock (the 10+ minute tracks, "I Was a Prisoner in Your Skull", "All Lined Up", "YRP"), Ambient ("Red Velvet Corridor", "The Beautiful Days"), a live Hardcore Punk song ("Yum-Yab Killers"), Dance-Pop ("Volcano") and way too many more to count.
• Lyrical Dissonance: Pretty much every track Jarboe sings, with the exception of "YRP".
  • "Volcano" is a fast-tempo dance-pop song with lyrics about cannibalizing a rock star.
  • "Red Velvet Wound" is a lullaby-like song about a miscarriage.
• Minimalistic Cover Art: Two rectangular labels on the top and bottom containing the band and album titles respectively overlaid on top of a yellow background with a gray circle in the middle.
• Miniscule Rocking: "Surrogate 2" (1:52) and "Fan's Lament" (1:28).
• No Ending: The album ends with a 2-minute long, single-note drone.
• Scare Chord: The shrieking synths that Fade In and out of "The Beautiful Days".
• Spoken Word in Music: The album makes extensive use of field recordings and samples, many of them taped monologues by anonymous speakers presented completely out of context.
• Suddenly Shouting: In "The Final Sacrifice", after about 5 minutes of soft instrumentals and Gira’s brooding delivery, out of nowhere he begins to scream-sing at the top of his lungs.
• Surreal Horror: It is a very weird, disjointed, and hostile musical experience. Almost every track is completely different from the one proceeding it, with brutal hardcore punk tracks being followed by drugged out dance pop numbers. The most pronounced example is one of the first tracks, "I Was a Prisoner in Your Skull", which is a procession of increasingly disturbing musical ideas spaced out over 6 minutes, all centered around a rambling, borderline schizophrenic monologue explaining why the listener is "fucked up".
• Talkative Loon: The dude speaking on "I Was a Prisoner in Your Skull", who goes on an excessively detailed rant about the ways in which the person he's speaking to is "fucked up."

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