Belligerent Swans by Belligerent Swans

Comprised of two decades-worth of home recordings—including rough sketches, demos and  experiments—Belligerent Swans is out now on Waste Management. In a dream come true this collection of 4-track cassette recordings dragged over years and miles by Hans Dobbratz was undressed and revived in the long hours of late 2020 as friends Cyrus Gengras and Jimi Hey began applying pressure. In Gengras’s home studio the three worked, at first playfully and then feverishly, to nudge these sometimes skeletal ideas back to life while preserving the inherently flawed character. Gengras doubled as dogged engineer and multi-instrumentalist while Hey worked after hours on arrangements, showing up spilling ideas and adding his sensitive touch. An accrual of creative misgivings, reversed asides, and death escapes, the resultant record champions its false starts and bum notes, threading Dobbratz’s multidirectional lyricism throughout. “As if Jackson Browne, inspired by Alex Chilton’s ‘Like Flies On Sherbert’ attempted to make his version of 2pac’s ‘All Eyes On Me.’”

An accrual of creative misgivings, reversed asides, and death escapes, the resultant record champions its false starts and bum notes, threading Dobbratz’s multidirectional lyricism throughout. “As if Jackson Browne, inspired by Alex Chilton’s ‘Like Flies On Sherbert’ attempted to make his version of 2pac’s ‘All Eyes On Me.’”