|
 REVIEWS
OF
CHANGE!
Pitchfork:
7.9 Out of 10
...
There's something
disquieting at the bottom of the Black Swans' songs, something
half-shaped and half-seen, like a body in a lake. The surface of the
music is usually calm and familiar, but something disturbing appears
briefly in the crest of each wave of violin or guitar. On the
emphatically titled Change!, their second full-length and first
for La Société Expéditionnaire, that something might be dread, or fear,
or some secret intelligence about which the band write and play but can
never disclose. It's the same something that haunted their debut, Who
Will Walk in the Darkness with You?, and their follow-up EP, Sex
Brain. Paradoxically, Change! doesn't actually change any of
their mysterious intent, but amplifies it.
Crisper and more pared down than their previous releases, albeit with
slightly less variation among the songs, Change! sounds
luminously cinematic, like Pinetop Seven or the soundtrack work of Nick
Cave and Warren Ellis, yet twilit songs like "Hope Island", "Purple
Heart", and even the silver-toned instrumental "Blue Moon #9" use these
familiar sounds for foreign ends-- they're not simply dark, but cleverly
dreadful, as if the Black Swans are smuggling something sinister inside
the lyrics and chords. Jerry DeCicca's voice still sounds hollowed at
its core, deep yet light, with that eerie vibrato that draws comparisons
to Stuart Staples of Tindersticks, but with a country bent instead of
soul. His and Christopher Forbes' deep Americana guitars still walk in
the darkness with Noel Sayres' scratchily emotive violin, the head to
the latter's heart. Bassist Canaan Faulkner and drummer Keith Hanlon
know to hang back, recognizing that rhythm on these songs must be
subliminal at best. Even when the melodies verge on lovely, which they
do on every song, they still sound uneasy. The Black Swans may be
trafficking in a kind of atmospheric indie folk-rock, but Change!
actually plays like a sort of blues, full of thoroughly digested worry
and world-weariness: "There's a dark cloud hanging over," DeCicca sings
on "Shake", "and trouble on my mind."
It's not that the Black Swans inhabit a strange world, but that they
depict the real world from such a strange perspective. These songs
portray crossroads, where weird metamorphoses are taking place, as
DeCicca describes changing from one self into another. "This is my new
face," he sings on opener "New Face", "I wear it for you." Or consider
the grim physicality of "Coats", sung over a rising and falling guitar
melody: "My skin is paint, watch it flake/ Pick up the brush, fix the
mistake." So that album title turns out to be a dire exclamation, like
yelling Help! or Watch out!, and Change! eventually reveals
itself to be a break-up album, where the end of a relationship
necessitates traumatic transformation. As DeCicca sings on the title
track, "All that's left is change." Period. - Stephen M. Deusner
Stylus:
Grade: 'A' ... There should be a pat means of conveying why the
Black Swans matter. Something like: “Dylan’s oblique, carpented melodies
sung in Fred Neil’s voice while Leonard Cohen plays fiddle.” Something
that could go on a CD wrapper, if anyone used those any more. But
clearly glibness will not suffice to bend your ear to a band you’ve
(likely) never heard of; we will have to do better, knowing we will
probably fail.
Change! is only the second full-length album by the Black Swans,
following on the delightfully priapic and correctly-titled Sex Brain EP.
By rights, it is too soon to expect them to have perfected the choked
swoon of the earlier works—the progression from Who Will Walk In The
Darkness With You? meditations on mortality to Sex Brain were like a
shuttered antique store full of miniatures of the corseted deceased,
turning unexpectedly pornographic behind the counter. And if not
premature, it would be perverse to suggest that a record about
metamorphosis and the pruning of dried limbs could be perfective in any
but the smallest sense. Let us then abjure the finality of superlatives
and lose ourselves in the pangs and aches of aspiration: the falling of
leaves and the shedding of skin.
Alas, the Black Swans will likely never command the following they
deserve, at once too strange and too stationary to bend the ear of
anyone not already beguiled by the warp and weft of Jerry DeCiccia’s
voice and Noel Sayre’s fiddle. On Change!, DeCiccia still doesn’t sing,
precisely; he moans and whispers, mostly, the microphone tightening the
strictures of lust, grief, fear and (eventually) hope. The close-miking
is perhaps the only way DeCiccia can match the dire desire of Sayre’s
violin, whose multiple strings sound like a breaking voice, swooping
abruptly low in incipient, unwelcome adulthood, then cracking
plaintively high, a range entirely foreign to DeCiccia rendered in
kissing cousin tones...
The quality of color to be rung from such austere ingredients shames
both the gimmick artists and those who seek drama in sheer thickness of
sound. Thus, while “Coats” gives full rein to the Swans’ taste for
purloined folk melodies, “Hope Island” is stripped to scarcely more than
a chipped gilt setting for a sonorously spare fiddle solo. Marooned,
DeCiccia mumbles to himself in the doubtful atonality of internal
monologue: “There are no fish / No one to love / My good friends left
me.” Then mysteriously, like sudden sun on a submerged swimmer, his
baritone burblings are picked out in filigreed feminine harmony,
breaking the illusion of unmelody.
But these are songs of allusion as much as illusion; hence “Blue Moon
#9,” which trades the furrowed brow for a wan falsetto set about with
reverb, like a wishful memory of a carnival. But where previous Swans
albums have luxuriated in dim, doomed human ecstasies, Change! is, as
the title suggests, a manifesto of sorts. The revolution will not be
straightforward, however; DeCiccia believes in recidivism and human
weakness at least as much as he aspires to growth. Thus the acute
tension between the averting gloom of “Slide On Down” and the measured
jubilance of the title track, in which DeCiccia admonishes himself:
“Gonna pick up the pieces / Buy a bottle of glue / Gonna count all his
blessings / My blessings used to be you.”
The guitar solo that follows is terse and minor, like a latter-day
Knopfler motif, presaging the wordless, harmonized coda that closes the
song, and effectively the album, on a note of such qualified optimism it
scarcely counts as such. It’s not that the sentiment rings hollow, not
exactly; but DeCiccia’s albums and his trembling voice are so
beautifully immured in solitude that, whether the subject is fucking or
forgetting, his attempts to touch anyone else are friable, lit by a
dubious, flawed hope. The songs are as conflicted and lovely as only
people’s graspings for each other are and, if in this sense only,
perfect.
Onion A.V. Club:
...A mood record that recalls the candlelit starkness of early Leonard
Cohen as backed by Bob Dylan's Desire-era band, Change!
perfectly captures a feeling of lonely desolation on mesmerizing dirges
like "Hope Island" and "Shake," where DeCicca's repressed vocals
contrast with the searing emotionalism of Noel Sayre's violin...
 REVIEWS
OF
SEX BRAIN E.P.
Pitchfork:
8 Out of 10 ...
The Black Swans hereby join the Faint and the Pink Mountaintops in
having made short releases (tee-hee) about libidinal matters, but Sex
Brain is no vamp-by-numbers affair: The focus is on the grievous
awkwardness of physical longing, and of trying to articulate it without
sounding macho, merely perverted, desperate, disloyal, or dopey.
Bandleader Jerry DeCicca seems to be trying to sidestep the dueling
fantasies perpetuated by most hump-hither music, electing to indulge
neither the larger-than-sex, overly confident meat-machine approach, nor
the sentimental, fluid-free, preemptively nostalgic lovemaker angle.
The
resulting quest-for-truth middle ground staked out by Sex Brain
is, again, plenty awkward. Fans of how 2004's Who Will Walk in the
Darkness With You could evoke a restrained, hellish dusk might be
well surprised by this disc's spent, tragicomic dawn. Opener "I Don't
Want 2 Fuck" is as upbeat and reticent as these proceedings get. "It's
all about me," the speaker admits, seconds before Canaan Faulkner's
accordion suggests a sad Fazoli's in Ireland. DeCicca sings about
spooning, "getting weird," existential doubt, and the centrality of
mouth-holes before the tune is over, in a voice that is just WTF
bizarre. Imagine a stoned-but-bookish, seductive Muppet. Imagine a more
fragile Tindersticks (Tenderdicks?), or that faux-comic-relief Jewish
guy from "Saved By the Bell" if he was a game-spitting mack (The Teaches
of Screech?). Either way, this tune stands alongside Naked Raygun's "No
Sex", Sold Out's "I Don't Want To Have Sex With You", and Lust Control's
entire discography in the canon of nocturnal-restraint advocacy.
"Friends" is sung to a tequila bottle. If you've ever forgotten how you
ended up in some depraved scenario, this joint's for thee. Hang on for
the verse, "She pulled my pants down/ And said she knows/ My
girlfriend." Memory and fidelity are complicated. Which leads to the
ex-lover masturbation fantasy, "Your Hands", about olfactory flashbacks
and whacking it to Bob Dylan albums, as Noel Sayre's violin weeps and
plucks its pubes. "Dark Plums" is essentially an homage to the Black
Swans' myspace-approved heroes the Dirty Three, a tension experiment
seasoned by Horace Roscoe's eerie saxophone.
"My Lips" is
a comparably sweet duet with Sara Jurcyk about post-orgasmic ennui. Its
refrain, "Never procreate," seems like an emotional prophylactic. My
only previous associations with Columbus, Ohio, are the band Moviola and
the novel The Right Man For The Job by Mike Magnuson, in which a dude
kills a dog with a cinderblock and his girlfriend sets herself on fire.
I did a local band search and found acts named Cleavage and Cameltoe to
be recommendable, so maybe the place is throttled with a horndog vibe.
While so many borderline smug avant-gardists are creating
(self-conscious?) freak-folk, the Black Swans' attempt to freakify
standard folk song structure, in terms of both Rick James' appetite for
action and in terms of unbowed eccentricity, is welcome and laudable.
That such atmospheric talents would take such topically riling chances
suggests that this band actively seeks apologists instead of boosters,
which is fine by me. More a bodice-tugger or fiddler than a ripper,
Sex Brain really satisfies. – William Bowers
Prefix Magazine: 3.5/5 ... In clumsier hands, the Black
Swans' five-song EP, Sex Brain, might have been called Penises
and Vaginas. Frontman Jerry DeCicca at first mumbles and then clearly
restates the word "swallow" on "Friends"; it is safe to assume that he
has absolutely no interest in ornithology, and it isn't a stretch to
infer that any interest DeCicca does have in birds may be purely sexual.
Sex Brain is often times graphic, absurdly un-sexy and completely
detached (until the finale), but it maintains a mood and mystery that
develops into a magnetism to conquer any moments that threaten to be
unsophisticated. It has the feel of an other-worldly observer (a cosmic
peeping Tom?) who is incapable of human sexual relations but proficient
enough in English to recount the sweaty behavior he sees humans engage
in -- a tough chore considering Sex Brain also deals in the
psychology of sex.
"Friends" documents the merits of alcohol in the abolition of
inhibitions: "She pulled my pants down and said she knows my
girlfriend." Sorrowful but unrepentant, Sayre's violin is seemingly the
only human element here. DeCicca gets a grip on his senses in "Your
Hands" by ditching the crippling dependence upon sight that is
characteristic of human beings; he crafts memories of a lost love
through a series of smells. "Dark Plums" makes use of virtually every
analogy that exists between food and anatomy (plum trees, fruits, dark
plums, orchards, juice, fruit flies, butter, jam), and in keeping with
the subtlety leaves a few for the listener to ponder (there is no
mention of melons, sausage, fur-burgers or hair-pies). "My Lips" is the
lightest sonically but closes out the EP by creating a jarring dichotomy
with the introduction of female vocals (Sara Jurcyk) and the direct take
on the meaning of sex when lust has been displaced by love: "Will we
wear out our welcome/ As closeness grows dull/ Our bodies too familiar/
My hard-on sinks into a lull."
The Black Swans' 2004 debut, Who Will Walk in the Darkness with You?,
was introspective, dark folk and every bit as creepy as the title
suggests. Here, the band moves cheerfully (?) into a more physical
realm, replacing the all-encompassing somberness with actual rock pieces
(although often times slow-moving) about external pleasures. Sex
Brain is an altogether entertaining find and no doubt a strange
bridge to whatever the band is planning as a follow-up. – Jonathan
Easley
Stylus: B+ ... Sex Brain has the queasy, melancholic
appeal of sex with an ex-lover or old friend...
Then again, there’s the mournful deliciousness of consequence-free,
sensual transgression. Over shadowy guitars, decaying in vibrato and
reverb, DeCicca intones “Tequila, my friend / She pulled my pants down /
And said she knows my girlfriend.” And I do mean “intones.” The only
thing more funereal than DeCicca’s singing is the scratchy, naked sorrow
of Noel Sayre’s violin, which sounds like something recorded at a wake
in rural Armenia.
On “Your Hands,” the same violin has all the elegance and formality of a
late-night country slow dance down south, but this particular slow dance
is performed alone: “And as you’re with someone else / You’re still
pleasing me / And your hands / Are better than mine / And your hands /
Aren’t here at my side.” The incisive acuity of DeCicca’s
self-observation is as bracing as it is discomfiting, making hip-hop’s
sexual braggadocio and emo’s self-pitying sexual narcissism appear
equally contrived and self-serving. Singing about what jerking off is
really like, the miniature pleasure and small sadness of the little
death, takes balls...
It seems fortunate for all concerned that there are no girls in the
band, at least not until the comparatively upbeat duet “My Lips,” which
marries an R.E.M.-style jangle to Desire-era Dylan sentiment “Believe in
love / Believe in fate / Believe in beauty / Never procreate.” It’s the
sweetest hymn to non-reproductive sex since 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop.”
The album ends with a certain burden lifted, if only temporarily, but
desire still coats DeCicca’s voice. A weight may have dissipated, but
the sexual imperative is as omnipresent as ever—the pleasure of the
album is only a brief respite from the demands of the Sex Brain.
– Andrew Iliff
Neumu:
What a difference a couple of years makes. In 2004, the Black Swans
caught our attention with the luminously beautiful, dark folk of Who
Will Walk in the Darkness With You. Ruminative, melancholy, shot
through with wild swoops of violin and glowing guitar, it was an album
charged with longing, the fear of death, the hope for connection with
others.
Sex Brain is a whole other animal, more rock than folk, more
about consummation than desire. Whereas a couple of years ago, the boys
in the Black Swans were walking around heartbroken in the dark, now
they're having a post-coital cigarette. Before, they had rocks in their
shoes weighting them down; now they have fingers between female legs and
girls hopped up on tequila pulling their pants down. Well, OK, good for
them.
As before, the band's core is still singer/guitar player Jerry DeCicca
and violinist Noel Sayre. The rest of the band is new with this album —
Canaan Faulkner on bass and accordion, Chris Forbes on electric guitar
and Keith Hanlon on drums — and they bring a volume and pop orientation
that wasn't apparent on the earlier album. "I.D.W.2 F." opens the disc,
with a more driving, electrified sound than before. The instrumentation
feels denser, with the jangle of guitars and the surge of accordion
under DeCicca's silky voice...
"Your Hands" is quite lovely, a much-needed alt-folk addition to a
select catalog of songs about masturbation. Sayre's violin work is
particularly fine here, billowing in the slow crevices between verse and
chorus, and there's a stately heft to the brush-on-snares percussion.
The song is really about memory, loss and desire, not just jerking off.
Even so it's still got a creepy, sort of too-much-information quality to
it, especially the last verse. ("We're together forever/ Like little
hairs you can't see/ And as you're with someone else/ You're still
pleasing me.")
The most interesting song on the EP is "Dark Plum," which erupts out of
a dirge of discordant feedback, a primal ooze of sorts comprised of
wheeling violin figures, the crash of cymbals and long-held guitar
notes. It's a wonderful drone, overlapping and sometimes overwhelming
the vocals, feeling both traditional and wild at the same time. It's
also the song that's most closely aligned with rejection... Closer "My
Lips" is tamer and more pop, a well-kept garden after the tangled chaos
of "Dark Plum." There are some pretty harmonies, courtesy of guest
singer Sara Jurcyk, and some lyrics about various sex acts slipped into
the folk-structured verses.
I found myself enjoying the music on Sex Brain best when I wasn't
listening to the lyrics very closely. Pay too much attention and this
album becomes like sitting in one of those crowded NYC restaurants where
people at neighboring tables are discussing the most personal aspects of
their lives at top volume. Sure you might get a little voyeuristic
charge out of it, but don't you feel kind of dirty after? – Jennifer
Kelly
Sixeyes:
7.8 Out of 10 ... The ghost-from-the-mouth-of-a-black-well voice of The
Black Swans, Jerry DeCicca, carries solemnity in heavy doses, but he is
obviously aware of the booming doom that can issue from his throat.
DeCicca leavens the sound with flashes of lyrical humor and an honest
reading of lusting/love songs on The Black Swans latest, Sex Brain.
This piece from "Friends" may catch you off guard, delivered as it is by
DeCicca's sombre tones: Tequila, my friend/You help my/Pituitary gland
bend. You know how clowns look sad and make you laugh, well, The Black
Swans sound sad and... you know the rest. Musically, I love the
bittersweet violin of "Your Hands", beautifully played by Noel Sayre,
who also wields the viola. On the blatant "Dark Plums", Sayre and Horace
Roscoe, on alto sax, meld their sounds into the sexual desire of
DeCicca's lyric. A compact and potent record from the sexual caves of
Columbus, Ohio. – Alan Williamson
Missoula Independent:
The Black Swans’ EP Sex Brain is, as the title implies, about
sex. It’s about the kind of sex that happens not on the Hollywood screen
or on Cosmo’s glossy pages, but the kind that is too common for
fetishists and so intimate it’s uncomfortable, and funny, like when
someone gets caught picking their nose or farting in class. Jerry
DeCicca’s vocals support the voyeuristic vibe—there’s a folksy solitude
to them (despite a six-musician backup), and an improvisational tone
that sounds like an impassioned drunkard singing to an empty room at
closing time. That’s not to say The Black Swans aren’t magnetic or
talented, they certainly are. DeCicca’s ruminations on masturbation and
the “dark plums” of his genitalia may seem like a case of too much
information, but his guitar-picking, laced with Horace Roscoe’s soft
saxophone and Noel Sayre’s sweet violin, offsets the blunt subject
matter with angelic melodies... Sex Brain is
a private portal to tunes demure and disturbing enough that you just
can’t turn away. – Erika Fredrickson
E-Mail Review: Hey - I'm here in Charlotte with Angelo and Aunt Joyce. We were talking
about you and pulled up your website. To my surprise I played your first
song on the New Album! Couldn't you have recorded without the language.
Really Jerry! I like the tune and sound but I'm a little disappointed in
your lyrics. I like the cover though. I'll call you when I get home
Tuesday evening. Take care........love you – Jerry's Mom
 REVIEWS
OF
WHO WILL WALK IN THE DARKNESS WITH YOU?
Copper Press:
A beautifully desperate and dark batch of tunes from The
Black Swans is just what any dark and desperate night of the soul cries
out for, for it is through such spare but deep-hearted music that we
begin to heal. Throughout this ten-song release we sit beside vocalist
Jerry DeCicca as he does his best American Bryan Ferry, reminding us
that we are not alone but sound very much so himself. You need only hear
pieces such as “Hours Never End,” with its somber opening piano figure
or “The Raft,” which stirs the soul from desperation to hope and then
back, or the self-explanatory “Days Are Long” to know that there is new
truth being spoken in this world about the human condition and that this
outfit is one of the most qualified (yet softest) speakers. Beautifully,
composed, arranged and performed, Who Will Walk in the Darkness with
You? makes you understand that the rest is indeed silence and walks
that narrow alley between absence and longing and presence and joy. – Jedd Beaudoin
Pitchfork (track review): Just when you thought
there weren't enough guys named Jerry making interesting music anymore,
out pops this old-fashioned death-folk five-piece helmed by Jerry DeCicca, a man whose speak-singing (whisper-begging?) will surely be the
line in the sand between his devotees and his detractors. Imagine a
Norwegian doing an impression of Leonard Cohen, only he has confused
Leonard Cohen with Ralph Stanley. Imagine a nursing home audience mutiny
that forces Alasdair Roberts to channel Chris Isaak. Imagine the stagey,
breathy tremble of Jamie Stewart trying to lull you to sleep (and taint
your dreams) rather than shock you awake.
This tune's traditional enough for parents, and spooky enough for kids.
Without disrupting the song's pastoral coherence, the guitar solo steals
J.J. Cale's technique back from Mark Knopfler. Who Will Walk In The
Darkness With You? uses familiar (to the point of being thought
stagnant) alt-country tools to craft a distinguished anthem for the slow
procession of late afternoons spent in a rotting cabin worrying about
the overdue rent, as well as spiritual debt. – William Bowers
Allmusic.com:
The debut album by Columbus,
OH's Black Swans is an exercise in spare, sweet melancholy that owes a
debt on the one hand to the Tindersticks and on the other hand, to a
lesser degree, to the spooky folk music that has inhabited the Hio River
Valley for centuries. Jerry DeCicca is the Black Swans' frontman and
songwriter. His acoustic guitar is at the bottom bedrock of the band's
sound. Its foremost element, however, is Noel Sayre's violin. Given that
Sayre is a classical violinist by trade, he walks a line between the
high lonesome style of folk tradition and the more formalized, refined
manner of playing required by his profession. Electric guitarist Milan
Karcic plays a more atmospheric role here, in the same fashion as
Michael Timmins with the Cowboy Junkies. Matt Surgeson's electric and
double bassing flutter on bottom, punctuated by Milan's brother Jovan
articulating a spare and dirgeful language on drums. Nothing here moves
quickly; it's all slow and slower. The band would have you believe the
sonics are austere, but they're so melodically rich and tender that
they're graceful and nearly elegant. The title track opens the set, and
it's apparent from the outset that Stuart Staples from the Tindersticks
has had a profound effect on DeCicca's phrasing. And no, that's not a
bad thing. Being able to carry dirgelike ballads with purpose and
tautness is a skill and DeCicca's abilities are consummate. Lyrically,
you already know what music like this is about, but its sources are
various, from the child and narrative ballad lineage to the postmodern
love song tradition with the elastic impressionism of poets like Robert
Creeley and Paul Blackburn as the bridge between them. The entire
recording flows from a single fountain and widens into a deep river of
sorrowful song. And that's its beauty as well as its curse. The latter
is obvious because most people don't like mopey music. But for those who
do, Who Will Walk in the Darkness With You? is keen, insightful, and
moving in the swirl of guitars, violins, and a voice that comes carries
within it all the weight and loss of broken love in this world. – Thom Jurek
Erasing Clouds: The Black Swans' music is eerie, yet at the same
time quite beautiful. The surface-level bleakness is often covering up
lovely evocations of solitude. There's an ample amount of George Jones
hidden in these bones, along with the more obvious Nick Cave. The Black
Swans sound is evocative of both old-time American C&W and British folk
music, in instrumentation (the violin and acoustic guitar) and the
bare-bones emotional landscape. And the overall tone is as serious as
Death himself ... This in its own way is
revealing, inspiring and quite gorgeous music. – Dave Heaton
Seattle PI: Who
Will Walk in the Darkness With You? is a violin-laced epic that crawls along at a heartbroken tempo,
just barely buoyed by the dark vocals of Jerry DeCicca. – Tizzy Asher
Nashville Scene:
It's not exactly 'Love Under
the Lime Tree,' but for those who prefer the gray, Who Will Walk in the
Darkness with You? is the feel-bad hit of the winter. – Paul V.
Griffith
Splendidzine.com - SXSW ’05: I do end up at
Friends early on in the evening for the Black Swans show, and their
luminous folk blues songs are mesmerizing, dark and utterly at odds with
everything I've heard at SXSW so far. Unfortunately, Noel Sayre, the
band's violinist, was unable to make the trip -- Jerry DeCicca later
said he was caring for an elderly father -- so the songs were missing
that swooning, swooping something that made Who Will Walk in the
Darkness with You? so hypnotic. Still, DeCicca's wonderful voice --
soft and mournful like Tindersticks' Stuart Staples -- and the very
evident skill of his second guitarist eventually won me over. –
Jennifer Kelley
Skyscraper: Playing a haunted brand of gothic country-folk that
creeps along at a dirge-like pace, the Columbus, Ohio quintet creates a
darkly austere sonic landscape where the Tindersticks, Smog, and
Lambchop all bob together in a slow, black stream. Lead vocalist Jerry
DeCicca writes serenely delicate songs about loneliness, loss, and
meaningless-ness, delivering one pained rhetorical question after another
with a sense of frail detachment. His soft croon adds an even deeper
sense of mystery and creepiness to the arrangements, as if he’s trying
to lull the listener into a false sense of security so that the murky
sonic sway will seem less ominously enveloping. – Matt Fink
High Bias: Wow, what kind of place is Columbus,
Ohio, that a band like this would emerge from it? The Black Swans
inhabits a flat, frozen land where violins hum, guitars breathe and
ghosts sob quietly in the distance. On the quintet's debut, leader Jerry DiCicca warbles about "Honest Eyes," "The Raft" and "Black Swan Blues"
as if he loves them but has been disappointed by them too many times.
The music gently tunes up twilight, hazy and austere, with unexpected
details revealed in the half-light. Who Will Walk in the Darkness
With You? is the sound of loneliness, serene, sad and beautiful. –
Michael Toland
Tiny Mix Tapes (Rating 4/5): Slow, sad folksongs
are singer-songwriter Jerry DeCicca's stock in trade. His debut record
as the Black Swans, Who Will Walk in Darkness With You?, is
filled with ambling ballads, sung by DeCicca in a dolorous but
understated baritone. Guitarist Milan Karcic, bassist Matt Surgeson, and
drummer Jovan Karcic provide a slowcore, dreamy backdrop, while
violinist Noel Sayre adds a pivotal textural layer, his fiddling exuding
a poignant melancholy that is often achingly lovely ... The Black Swan's music may banish the sun,
but I'd prefer Who Will Walk in Darkness With You? to most
records as rainy day music. – Christian Carey
Orlando Weekly: You know that feeling you get
when you listen to a Giant Sand record? Or a Tom Waits record, or a Tim
Buckley record, for that matter? That knot in your gut that comes from
hearing a singer whose voice simply does not fit a standard definition
of how a singer should sing? That sensation is at play all throughout
the debut from this Columbus group. Who Will Walk is filled with sparse,
low-impact melancholy, with piano lines drifting in and out, snare drums
lightly tapped, fiddles mourning in the background ... it's all about a
sort of exhausted loneliness. And then there's Jerry DeCicca's voice, a
world-weary baritone dripping with unfulfilled drama, tearily wending
its way through the album's 10 tracks. The end effect is darkly
obscured, lower-case-g-gothic blues that would be unimaginable without
such a unique voice. Not a disc to lift the spirits, this is the sound
you hear before you take that last pill. Enjoy. – By Jason Ferguson
Auralminority.com:
Unrelentingly introspective,
hauntingly melodic and subtly romantic, the Black Swans offer a midnight
study of an existence where the joy of fulfillment and the pain of loss
are spirits that are more closely related than we normally care to
acknowledge... – Ben Kirst
Blogcritics.com: A heartbreaking and beautiful debut
... I'll certainly be standing in line for their next release. – Bryan
McKay
Aftertaste:
Perfect for those moments of balance when life has been going a
million miles an hour ... Heavy, thick, and full of many feelings, all
at once.
SCTAS: I was at a Buddy and Julie Miller concert
once. While Buddy tuned up between songs, Julie talked to the crowd
about Emmy Lou Harris. She wondered out loud why it is that sad songs
can make you feel so good.
I found myself thinking about what she said again when I listened to the
Black Swans' Who Will Walk in the Darkness With You?. The spare
arrangements, the unfailing sadness and resignation in Jerry DeCicca's
voice and lyrics, the minor keyed turns of the violin, the inventively
aching guitar lines.. .they somehow turn bleakness into something that
makes me feel really, well, alive...
DeCicca's supporting musicians give equally amazing performances. Noel
Sayre plays guitar in a spare and winding, slightly country inflected
style. Milan Karcic's playing has the feel of both the feel and colors
of a country or bluegrass fiddler and a classical violinist. And the
interplay between Karcic and Sayre as they trade solos, take turns
supporting each other and DeCicca's vocals are perfect. Listen to the
first 25 seconds or so of "The Raft" and the emotion that Karcic brings
to simple supporting chords on the violin underneath Sayre's solo. Then
listen to how the two of them help DeCicca build and the emotion of the
song with swelling chords and arpeggios. Listen how they come forward in
the breaks between vocal lines. These are musicians who are listening
closely to each other and who serve the needs of the song.
This is the kind of album that gets better each time you hear it. It
asks that you listen closely and asks you to slow down. And on each
listen, it opens up to you a little more. It doesn't make sense that sad
songs could make you feel good. But the Black Swan's Who Will Walk in
the Darkness with You? does just that. Somehow they've taken that
darkness and made it into something beautiful.
Harp Magazine:
There may be more depressing
experiences than listening to the suicide folk music on the Black Swans’
debut, but until the puppy-euthanization room at the local dog pound is
open for public tours you probably won’t have one.
Composer/singer/arranger/producer Jerry DeCicca and co. have brought
forth what is possibly the dreariest collection of songs in all of
recorded history. Sure, music doesn’t have to be upbeat and cheery to be
good. If that were true, we wouldn’t have much country and western, or
blues, or some of the best work by Bob Dylan and certainly Leonard
Cohen. The Black Swans, however, make Cohen seem like a children’s party
clown... – Rick Allen
send e-mail to:
theblackswansband@gmail.com
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