Fantasy Food

Album review

A comparatively deafening two-year silence followed the release of Giant Swan’s Do Not Be Afraid Of Tenderness, with its throbbing gristle of spectrum-piercing noise, conceived during the height of the pandemic era. No surprise, every moment since has been spent making up for lost time, touring incessantly across all corners of Europe and (more recently) the States. That silence has proved a pregnant one, as the stalwart outfit re-emerges impassioned from the turbid banks of the Avon with Fantasy Food: a 5-track coup de grâce, ablaze with eye-watering, hyper-driven cuts. Signature quasi-vocal tissues are wrought through their zingy, ultra-saturated circuitry, atop characteristically relentless percussion across this eagerly anticipated record.

‘Sugar and Air’ leaves you gasping for breath between transients, as bands of percs engage in all-out sonic warfare. A babble of shell shocked, time-warped voices plead for respite around the halfway mark, but the armistice is a brief one, swelling once more into a rigorous 4/4 onslaught. The roily precision of ‘Abacuses’ follows in hot pursuit: brash, gnarly basslines bubble between broken kick patterns, as swells of wigged-out 909 cymbals ripple across bar lines and a breathy arpeggio riff rolls off in the mids. The thematic climax of the EP is surely its eponymous track ‘Fantasy Food’, weaving together its fundamental elements in a beatless, infernal dirge. Its frenzied synth line pressurises the stifling atmosphere as klaxons sound the oncoming doom of the record’s final act: two peak-time weapons, in ‘Boasting’ and ‘RRR+1’. Though both will surely blow out even the sturdiest of warehouse sound systems, it’s the latter which shines brightest: a face-melting coda, whose propulsive force continually splits the atomically charged arpeggiator at the centre of the track. It’s a war of attrition when it comes to Giant Swan—and their sound design hits with all the bone-shaking force of an airborne horde of savage waterfowl at terminal velocity. Top drawer. © Finn Kverndal/Qobuz