"YOUR NAME IS FUCK!"
"No dream, no sleep, no suffering."
—"Screen Shot"
To Be Kind is the thirteenth album by experimental rock band Swans. Easily the band's most widely known album thanks to both peaking at number 37 on the Billboard Hot 100 albums list as well as a review from The Needle Drop, "To Be Kind" is the second entry in an informal trilogy of 2-hour albums, with this entry being the most relatively straightforward with its groove-centric riffs as well as some of the band's heaviest moments.
Tracklist:
Disc 1:
- "Screen Shot" (8:04)
- "Just a Little Boy (For Chester Burnett)" (12:39)
- "A Little God in My Hands" (7:08)
- "Bring the Sun/Toussaint L'Ouverture" (34:05)
- "Some Things We Do" (5:09)
Disc 2:
- "She Loves Us!" (17:00)
- "Kirsten Supine" (10:32)
- "Oxygen" (7:59)
- "Nathalie Neal" (10:14)
- "To Be Kind" (8:22)
Bring the tropes!:
- Celebrity Song:
- The second track has the subtitle "For Chester Burnett," an American blues singer known as Howlin' Wolf.
- Not really a celebrity, but Toussaint L'Ouverture was an important general in the Haitian revolution.
- Cluster F-Bomb: "She Loves Us!" provides us with the image quote above and then some.
- Either/Or Title: "Bring The Sun/Toussaint L'Overture."
- Epic Rocking: While not Swans' longest studio album, it's a particularly notable example of this trope, still just barely exceeding two hours in length.
- To say nothing of the tracks themselves. Not a single track is under 5 minutes, with the longest being "Bring the Sun/Toussaint L'Ouverture" (34:05), "She Loves Us!" (17:00), "Just a Little Boy (For Chester Burnett)" (12:39), "Kirsten Supine" (10:32) and "Nathalie Neal" (10:14).
- Gratuitous French: "Toussaint L'Overture"
- List Song: "Screen Shot" and "Some Things We Do". The former's lyrics consist largely of "no X, no Y, no Z," etc. while the latter is "we X, we Y, we Z," etc.
- One-Woman Song: "Kirsten Supine" and "Nathalie Neal."
- Textless Album Cover: Only the picture of the crying baby.
