Swans - Liturgy of the apocalypse

Extreme, violent, unsettling: Swans are one of the legends of alternative rock. Starting out with a dissonant rock sound shading into white noise, over the years they arrived at a form of gothic, spectral atmosphere, built on explosions of guitars and seductive melodies, "industrial" percussion and rarefied textures, as well as on the contrast between the zombie-like voice of guitarist Michael Gira (a sort of underworld Bowie) and the siren-like voice of singer Jarboe. Their stories are raw, desolate portraits, musical manifestos on the urban violence of America's great cities, on decay, on alienation. Hallucinatory visions of a life lived to the extreme, just like that of Michael Gira: raised in Los Angeles with almost no family, he spent long stretches in juvenile detention for vandalism, theft and assault. Hooked on drugs since childhood, by the age of twelve he was already fully dependent on LSD. At thirteen he ran away from home and settled in Los Angeles, where he began playing music. A scarred childhood that would remain the psychological key to his work.

Swans were born in New York in the early 1980s, out of the ashes of Circus Mort, on the initiative of Gira (also the author of a self-titled Ep, a sort of "industrial" combination with the nascent European dark scene) and Jonathan Kane. The debut album, Filth (1983), also features Roli Mosimann, Norman Westberg and Harry Crosby. It's a chilling portrayal of the violence of a megalopolis like New York. Searing chords combine with dissonance and industrial cacophony in a sonic chaos that offers no escape. A setting made even more harrowing by tracks such as "Stay Here", which merges the hallucinations of Chrome with the guitar orgies of Sonic Youth, "Blackout", driven by an obsessive drumbeat, "Power For Power", a slowed-down voodoobilly, right through to the final collapse of "Gang", where a ramshackle chant seems almost to mimic the last spasm of a dying man.

Swans' brutal sound won its first acclaim within the "alternative" circuit and was dubbed "boom music" for one particular trait: those deafening instrumental "booms" layered beneath the frontman's vocalizations. As with Pere Ubu, their "modern dance" is nothing less than an epitaph for industrial society, reduced to shreds and unable to offer any escape to a humanity adrift. Already by the time of the second album, Cop (1984), Gira was the only original member left in the band, though the sonic blueprint remained unchanged: industrial clangor fused with a macabre rhythm, slashing guitars and the singer's zombie voice. Gira's ordeal unfolds through surreal tableaux like "Half Life", "Clay Man", "Your Property" and "Job", which plunge into chasms of desolation, telling of a mechanized, agonizing humanity.

1985 is a pivotal year. After the Ep Crawled (notable for the lysergic "I Crawled", which echoes "The End" by the Doors), came Greed, an album fundamental to Swans' history, because it marks the entry into the band of Jarboe, Gira's partner from that point on, who plays piano and accompanies him on vocals. A female presence that would help redeem Gira's damned spirit, making the group's sound less harsh even if still tragically gothic. With this formula, Swans transformed into a more mature band. Their new sound hovers between noise fury and folk melancholy, built by balancing fullness (guitar explosions, industrial percussion) and emptiness (seductive melodies, rarefied atmospheres), alternating Gira's cavernous voice with Jarboe's beguiling one (a disciple of the school of Lydia Lunch, Diamanda Galás, Exene Cervenka). "I've always been a nonconformist, an outsider, a free spirit, an iconoclast," the Atlanta-born singer recalls. "I met Michael in a curious way: I was baking cookies in my mother's kitchen in 1983, when 'Power for Power' from Swans' album 'Filth' played on the local college radio station. I called the station and asked who they were and where I could get the album. I played that record endlessly. I wrote to the address on the back cover, and got in touch with Michael Gira, who invited me to New York to hear Swans rehearse. I fell in love with him and moved to New York."

Greed is a less apocalyptic work than its predecessors, but equally unsettling, with horror-movie-style piano chimes and Jarboe's entrancing voice intoning tales of perdition and death, as in "Nobody", "Fool" and "Stupid Child". A thread picked up a year later with Holy Money, devoted to the theme of power and money, in which funereal atmospheres pair with a singular fondness for a more atmospheric chamber-rock sound ("Another You", "A Hanging", "Fool"). The Stooges of the masterpiece "I Will Fall" are transformed, in Gira's pieces, into vampires of a brutal, restless world.

After the parenthesis of Skins (the duo's side project, devoted to a mystical music close to Popol Vuh), Gira and Jarboe return with Swans to sign their masterpiece: Children Of God (1987). The band is now an expanded ensemble, built around the axis of Gira (vocals and keyboards), Westberg (guitar) and Jarboe (vocals, piano and acoustic guitar). The record's key theme is the pairing of sin and redemption: submission to the divine is experienced through a morbid, oppressive religiosity. It is never God who speaks (save for the exception of "Trust Me"), but rather his faithful ("children"), protagonists of a calvary that unfolds through surreal tableaux, suspended between the darkest expressionism and the ancestral atmospheres of a timeless fairy tale.

Obsessive clangs of drums open the baritone declamation of Gira on the opening "New Mind", which immediately sounds like an inescapable prophecy: "The sex in your soul will damn you to hell". But the angelic Jarboe is quick to dispel the specters of damnation, intoning the dreamlike litany of "In My Garden" over a delicate piano backing. "Our Love Lies" is another display of Gira's deranged singing, like a dying ogre muttering disjointed words in a deep, monotone register.

Built on the same template, but with the addition of a deathly choir at the close, is "Sex, God, Sex", in which devotion to God becomes outright sexual self-denial. And if sex was the road to Gira's damnation in "New Mind", for Jarboe it instead becomes an irresistible temptation in "Blood And Honey" (“We’ll lie down in the warm green grass/ And the sun will shine on our pale shape/ Our blood will flow black in the dirt/ And a black rose will grow where we laid”). Flesh and blood merge in a dark ritual, in which Jarboe's Gregorian chant is accompanied by a Middle Eastern-flavored melody and the thrilling sound of the oboe. But devotion to God can also turn into an overdose of religious ecstasy, as Gira warns in "Like A Drug", another of his hallucinations, crowded with horror effects à la Siouxsie and driven by mechanically "metallic" rhythms, with the closing chorus ("Sha-La-La-La") turning an innocuous little verse into the most chilling of nightmares.

Gira then seeks a little respite in the lullaby of "You're Not Real", with guitar arpeggios keeping company to his increasingly desolate baritone. It's only a momentary pause before the storm of damnation thunders again on the notes of "Beautiful Child" (“I will kill the child/ The beautiful child/ This is my life/ This is my choice/ This is my damnation”), in a Grand Guignol crescendo. And just as the tension reaches its breaking point, the priestess Jarboe appears to close our eyes (“Close your eyes/ And close in around me/ Say you’ll do anything for me”) and wrap us in the tender melody of "Blackmail", in an oasis of eternal calm. It is God who speaks in the following "Trust Me", urging his faithful toward an act of faith and love. And it's a "real" love ("Real Love", with Gira begging God to end his ordeal: "Take me down/ Into the cold dead earth"). And it's a "blind" love ("Blind Love", with Gira playing Christ, the "cold dead man" who conquers death and rises from the tomb). The solemn invocation of the title track finally dispels the ghosts that haunt the record, as the choir obsessively repeats its hymn of salvation: “We are special/ We are perfect/ We were born in the sight of god/ Our suffering bodies will suffer no more/ We are children/ Children of God”. But behind Swans' redemption, the shadow of death always lurks.

Children Of God is a tragically gothic album, steeped in a "cosmic" pessimism pierced only occasionally by the purest rays of sunlight dispensed by the vestal Jarboe, a disciple of the dark school of Siouxsie, Lydia Lunch, Diamanda Galás and Exene Cervenka, yet endowed with a soprano that sounds both arcane and moving, soft and solemn. It's the record that marks Swans' turning point: from the brutal nihilism of their early days to fully-formed sonic sequences that nonetheless keep their originality intact. Further proof comes with the 12" "Love Will Tear Us Apart", a cover in two versions of the Joy Division classic.

The following records confirm Swans' new, more folk and "medieval-leaning" course. For Burning World (1989) the lineup is enriched by Bill Laswell's bass, Nicky Skopelitis's guitar, Garo Yellin's cello, Ravi Shankar's sitar and Eastern percussionists. The theme is again man's perdition, prey to his sins and unbridled lust (sex, money, power). A repertoire that also characterizes Ten Songs For Another World (1990) by The World Of Skin, the duo's side project.

Swans' return, with the double album White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity (1991), marks a further step toward a pastoral, dreamlike folk sound. It features some masterful passages, such as the medieval "Better Than You", the hypnotic "Power And Sacrifice" and the aching "When She Breathes", performed by Jarboe with a pathos worthy of peak Sinead O'Connor. Swans' gloomier soul, meanwhile, lives on in tracks like "You Know Nothing" or "Why Are We Alive", with Gira playing a mad preacher à la Nick Cave, suspended between damnation and redemption.

Love Of Life (1992) boasts a track like "Her", a sort of three-part ballad: the first with Gira's booming voice backed by a guitar arpeggio, the second with an obsessive guitar and the drums' martial cadence, the third with the voice of a fourteen-year-old Jane Jarboe, recorded one summer many years earlier. The record goes on, suspended between hypnotic fables ("The Sound Of Freedom") and darker rituals ("In The Eyes Of Nature"), in a kind of aching journey of self-awareness.

Ambitious, but perhaps less successful, Soundtracks For The Blind (1996) brings in new musicians, such as Larry Mullins on percussion and vibraphone (a session man for Iggy Pop), Vudi (of American Music Club) on guitars and Joe Goldring (of Toiling Midgets). Avant-garde electronics à la Klaus Schulze combine with long, stretched-out guitar sounds; sounds that are at times ambient, at others noisier and more distorted. The album's high point is the sixteen minutes of the requiem "Helpless Child", which confirms Gira in the role of dark prophet of an incoming ice age.

Then come The Great Annihilator (with William Rieflin of Ministry on drums), which echoes atmospheres dear to fellow New Yorkers Sonic Youth, and Omniscience. Then the end. Swans Are Dead, as their final album puts it. With the musical adventure over, Gira and Jarboe also end their romantic relationship. "Michael and his managers had realized the band had become passive," Jarboe explained. "Michael wanted to do something outside of Swans, the band had become too great an effort." The new productions signed by Gira (records made as The Angels of Light, but also those produced for Ulan Bator and US Maple) and Jarboe (or rather, The Living Jarboe) would still prove valid. And Swans' influence would be clearly felt on a swarm of musicians devoted to blending electro-industrial, metal and noise sounds, such as Scorn, Skin Chamber, Godflesh, but also Nine Inch Nails and Ministry.

All richly indebted to a band that, in 1999, would instead ironically celebrate its own commercial failures in the compilation Various Failures.

After the parenthesis of Angels Of Light, almost out of nowhere Gira dusts off Swans again. And My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky sums up the whole of Gira from the years-long hiatus of his beloved creature: his various facets as mastermind, bandleader, talent-scout, producer and composer all flow into this work, managing once again to sound truly terrifying while letting the man behind Gira emerge in direct compositions.

Backed by the ever-faithful Norman Westerberg, the tireless Bill Rieflin on drums, but also by a small delegation from Angels Of Light (Phil Puleo, Thor Harris), effective featuring spots from New York multi-instrumentalist Brian Carpenter, and even cameos from Grasshopper of Mercury Rev (on mandolin) and former protégé Devendra Banhart (on "You Fucking People Make Me Sick"), it's Gira's most deliberate, contradictory, self-indulgent creation, and not just within Swans. Somewhere between a reunion and the record of a pyramidal ensemble, it's an act of worship, of self-totemism. It draws on ideas from every time and place, the most recent chronologically being those from "I Am Not Insane", a compilation of demos recorded by Gira alone and released in a limited edition by the obvious Young God label (here lie the skeletons of these tracks, all except "You Fucking People Make Me Sick", which belongs more to Angels Of Light and Akron/Family than to the real Swans). It has no great depth, nor any particular ambition toward redemption or damnation, but is simply an expansion of a sound-as-soul.

Two years later, The Seer officially marks, with a certain degree of formality, the band's entry into its fourth era. Presented with some pomp as the culmination of Swans, thirty years in the making and with material still unfinished, it is in fact their fourth double album, something of a new Soundtracks for the Blind. Here, above all, appear huge, towering river-songs, such as the 32-minute toccata and fugue of the title track (their record), the pure soundscape of "Piece of the Sky" (19 minutes), the epic 21 minutes of "The Apostate".

The return to the band's origins is marked by tracks like "Mother of the World", with lyrics reduced to formulas, in the manic repetitions and jarring electronic effects, and by irrational moments like "93 Ave. Blues". Two hours packed with visions, hyperboles, sonic tsunamis, and also with contrasts in terms of length, style and orchestration, whose mythic aura is sealed by a host of guests and collaborators, and by a luxurious reunion with adventure companion Jarboe. Their abstract endpoint.

In 2014 came To Be Kind, another monster of a record that continues the project's saga with the same ingredients as its predecessor, and the second massive career recap in two years. This time, though, the urge to astonish the newly regained audience of old and new fans seems to override inspiration: across a full two hours spread over two CDs of extended tracks, Gira only manages to replay — impeccably, but mechanically — by-now rote tropes, from talking-blues to gothic litanies to Glenn Branca-style maximalism, plus the usual roster of prestigious guests. By endlessly repeating himself in imitation of the demonic puppet-master he once was, he ends up delivering a placid listen devoid of direction or necessity.

The fourth life of the legendary Swans name closes with yet another double album, The Glowing Man (2016), a work that defines this phase, for better or worse, by repeating to the letter the traits of its immediate, elephantine predecessors. What gradually emerges is an improbable Michael Gira superstar, ever more removed from the project's original intent, with new monster tracks that are mostly interchangeable and excessively bloated: "Cloud Of Forgetting" and "Cloud Of Unknowing", the fake double track "The World Looks Red/The World Looks Black", right up to the half-hour title track, where the oversized ego of Gira-the-singer and Gira-the-conductor is laid bare. In truth, these pieces work best the more vividly one can picture the well-oiled, imposing ensemble performing them. And in an ideal anthology of this Swans phase, it would be the lesser tracks that deserve a place: "When Will I Return?" (with his wife Jennifer) and the choir of "Finally Peace".

As a preview of the next Swans incarnation, the project's deus ex machina Michael Gira released a kind of demo session meant to raise funds for the studio album to come, which would be built on the same songs. But the voice-and-guitar-only interlude of What Is This? is not merely a stopgap release for die-hard fans: the ten sketches gathered here manage to evoke the human and the superhuman, the wretched and the divine at once, in some cases even more powerfully than the annihilating suites he produced in years past.

Between ideas exhumed from the drawers of memory and new, blazing trances, Gira's songbook in its raw state is lit up by flashes of inspiration that are as vivid and dazzling as ever, the continuation of a perennial, overflowing state of mind, an unstoppable flow of human and artistic transcendence.

Leaving Meaning (2019) was billed as rich in collaborations (with Ben Frost, Anna von Hausswolff, the experimental jazz trio The Necks), which immediately suggested a turning point. It's a Gira who plays dress-up, now as a cursed singer-songwriter ("Cathedrals Of Heaven"), now as a tormented poet à la Nick Cave ("Annaline"), down to small ambient experiments ("Hums"). Indeed, the record is haunted by the gothic folk-tale spirit of an album like Cave and the Bad Seeds' "Murder Ballads", as well as by the figure of Leonard Cohen — from Gira's vocal delivery to the backing choirs — the latter present more as an attempt to escape the darkness than to aspire to eternity. When Gira returns to his usual shamanic role, he does so with unusual restraint, yet still within the style that has defined this latest Swans phase.

The album has elegiac moments, in the style of Esmerine, upon which the repetitions and industrial rhythms typical of the Swans sound suddenly crash down. "The Hanging Man" and "Sunfucker" are the two tracks that in the "old" Swans would have been dubbed monster tracks. The former echoes the repetitiveness of "The Glowing Man", while the latter is clearly a descendant of "Bring The Sun" from the album "To Be Kind". Ben Frost tries to carve his way between Gira's words of submission ("Surrender, Surrender!") over pagan rites and human sacrifice; his role is precisely that of a conduit, whose job is to amplify the album's most extreme and thunderous aspects. It's in "Sunfucker" itself, inspired by Aztec culture and specifically by a drawing Gira had seen in a book, that the Swans leader takes on the persona of a priest who, atop a pyramid, tears the heart from a sacrificial victim's chest to offer it to the sun.

Shaman, guru and philosopher, Gira ponders how the human mind, under the influence of any given religion, can come to believe firmly in acts of unspeakable violence. References to contemporary American society are not lacking, the strongest found in the slow dark ballad "Amnesia" ("the President's mouth is a whore, when there's a murder the crowd roars"), bleak and pessimistic about all human action (somewhere between Leonard Cohen and Roger Waters), the offspring of a society where only violence, the crude shout and the shameless lie seem to rouse the anesthetized masses.

The biggest regret concerns Frost's all-too-limited contribution: rather than merely being a sounding board for Gira's anxieties, he could have become the true medium for that narrative universe, carrying the listener into an even more remote space through the dark, compressed sonics characteristic of the Australian musician's electronic work.

The tour for Leaving Meaning with Ben Frost and Anna von Hausswolff looked like an unmissable event, but the pandemic sadly scrapped it all. Gira sank into a depressive phase, and in 2022 announced in a post the release of The Beggar. A weary, in some ways worrying announcement, from a Gira worn down by the fatigue and disappointment of two years forcibly kept off the stage, who "felt" this would be his final album.

There are many premonitions, from "Michael Is Done" — almost a farewell to everything ("when Michael's gone, another one will come") — to "Unforming" ("soon I'll disappear, who cares and who knows where I've been or where I'll go"), to the deeply sad folk ballad "No More Of This", strikingly melodic for a Swans song. It is Gira's final testament, bidding farewell to everyone and everything, from his children to life itself, facing death as "an absence of rage and fear" ("There will be no new bright and shining day, no tomorrow, no open road, now is finally the time to go"). And imagining himself no longer there, he hopes for the existence of a god ("I pray to heaven that you exist in a cloud of healing mist that permeates your deepest being"). Perhaps the most touching moment of his entire career, alongside "The Helpless Child".

The parasite of "The Parasite" is old age, which pervades every man's body and takes hold of him step by step, leaving total surrender as the only possible outcome. The ever-present grandeur, despite the absence of the old walls of sound, becomes hypnotic and melancholic. The ending of "Ebbing", with bass, keyboards and acoustic guitar, evokes kraut scenarios somewhere between Popol Vuh and Neu!, while "Los Angeles: City Of Death" (barely three minutes long) is a fresh meditation on death and illness ("Growing in a lung, here it comes, here it comes").

But the most anticipated track is "The Beggar Lover (Three)", which outlasts every other Swans song in duration, even those christened monster tracks over the years, which pale before its forty-three minutes. It opens with solemn synths, which live reach the band's customary deafening volumes, spoken word from Jennifer Gira (Michael's daughter), percussion, and then an extremely long composition that could be described as a dark suite running from echoes of "The Seer" to the hypnotic instrumental passage from minute 12 to minute 24, which keeps accelerating toward the finale, before closing at minute 22 with a repetitive female choir. Suddenly, industrial sounds with wordless vocalizations herald the voice of Saoirse Gira (Michael's second daughter), kicking off a new instrumental section from minute 27 to 35. The percussion grows imperious and opens the way for Gira's own vocals, which arrive only in the final eight minutes. By now Gira's voice grows ever more ethereal, as though his body no longer has physical substance but is a spirit wandering free ("I can see it but not see it, I can feel it but not hold it, I can touch it but not keep it"), in one last harrowing farewell.

Birthing, the seventeenth studio album by the storied New York band, is as monumental a work as ever. An hour and fifty-five minutes spread across just seven tracks, five of which run between fifteen and twenty-two minutes: pretty much what you'd expect from Swans. Birthing is something of a synthesis of what Swans have done over the last thirty years, a summa of many of Gira's recurring ideas, from shamanic chanting to poetic lyrics, from obsessive repetition to hammering rhythms alternated with endless stretches of stasis, to what Gira has called — in recent interviews — big sound, which we had previously translated as the so-called monster tracks.

Birthing thus sounds like a return to The Seer, as is clear from the title track, which — for at least its first ten minutes — seems lifted straight from that unforgettable record, while in its second half it recalls a less harrowing version of the classic repeated two-chord pattern of "Bring The Sun" or "The Glowing Man", before relaunching itself with an almost psychedelic, dreamlike vocal that closes with a pounding finale. Nothing Swans haven't already done, but it's all perfect as it is, and it couldn't have been any other way.

The true big sound track is "The Healers", repeatedly tested out in recent solo live shows, which displays Gira's usual hypnotic, shamanic power. Just two notes of acoustic guitar, a backdrop of lap steel guitar, a female choir and Gira's powerful voice rising like a monolith for the first seven minutes, before every instrument enters in pursuit of yet another monster track, with a delirious finale (once again lifted from The Seer) that live will be pure noise ecstasy.

There are also some memories that seem to have escaped from the Nineties in "The Merge", with a frenzied electronic sound that seems to emerge straight from the most experimental tracks of that masterpiece, Soundtrack For The Blind (1997). The power that at times had (magnificently, in my view) spiraled out of control on the strongest albums of the monster trilogy is here instead always held in balance against the moments of (albeit uneasy) stillness of "(Rope) Away", a shortened version of "Rope" (thirty-one breathtaking minutes) that opened every live show of 2024 (available on the "Live Rope" CD from the same year). This version, a mere (so to speak) nineteen minutes long, is pure ecstasy, a genuine rebirth of both the post-rock sounds and the dreamlike, psychedelic textures typical of Christoph Hahn's and Norman Westberg's guitars.

Gira manages to surprise us further with the first single "I Am A Tower", which – after the long preparatory intro – from the thirteenth minute onward moves into classic new wave territory, recalling the David Bowie of the Berlin trilogy, in particular "Heroes", with the guitar clearly paying tribute to Robert Fripp. Swans become tuneful, even danceable, if only for a few minutes. If this isn't a rebirth...

Contributions by Michele Saran ("My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky", "The Seer", "To Be Kind", "The Glowing Man"), Michele Palozzo ("What Is This?"), Valerio D'Onofrio and Maria Teresa Soldani ("Leaving Meaning"), Valerio D'Onofrio ("The Beggar", "Birthing")

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