Swans

“Children Of God” marks the peak of the saga of Swans, a band as legendary within the underground as it is unknown to the wider public — so much so that in 1999, to “celebrate” their (non-)successes, they released a compilation ironically titled “Various Failures”. In truth, guitarist Michael Gira's outfit undoubtedly ranks among the most important names on the alternative scene straddling the Eighties and Nineties: his urban nightmares, steeped in violence, alienation and death, have become a crucial reference point for the “industrial” universe and beyond.

Starting out with a dissonant rock pushed to extremes of white noise on “Filth” (1983), Swans gradually settled into a gothic, spectral sound built on guitar explosions and beguiling melodies, “industrial” percussion and obsessive atmospheres, as well as on the contrast between Gira's zombie-like voice (a sort of Bowie from beyond the grave) and the siren-like tones of the enchanting Jane Jarboe, who began working alongside him from 1985 onward.

The perfect proof of this miraculous balance is precisely "Children Of God", a double album released in 1987 on the independent label Caroline and destined to soon vanish from record store shelves (though not from the internet), despite a sprawling underground fame and the subsequent reissue by Young God as a double CD (paired with "World Of Skin", the band's side project). It is a tragically gothic album, steeped in a "cosmic" pessimism into which only occasionally seep the purest rays of sunlight dispensed by the vestal Jarboe, disciple of the dark school of Siouxsie, Lydia Lunch, Diamanda Galás and Exene Cervenka, yet endowed with a mesmerizing soprano that sounds at once arcane and pulsing, soft and austere.

The sonic evolution of Swans arrives at a fully realized song form, one that doesn't compromise the "iconoclastic" message but rather sharpens its impact through more cohesive, forceful musical structures. The fury of noise-rock and the melancholy of a medieval-tinged folk follow one another in a carefully measured balance of density (the guitar detonations, the industrial percussion) and emptiness (the enchanting melodies, the ethereal atmospheres). A result achieved thanks to an expanded ensemble, with Gira on keyboards and guitars, Norman Westberg on guitars, Jarboe on keyboards, Algis Kizys on bass and Theodore Parsons on drums. The record's central theme is the pairing of sin and redemption: submission to God is experienced through a morbid, oppressive religiosity. It is never God who speaks (with the exception of "Trust Me"), but his faithful ("children"), protagonists of a calvary that unfolds through surreal tableaux, suspended between the darkest expressionism and the ancestral atmosphere of a timeless fairy tale.

Obsessive clangs of drums introduce Gira's baritone declamation on the opening "New Mind", which sounds immediately 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" against the backdrop of an exceedingly delicate piano accompaniment.

"Our Love Lies" is another display of Gira's delirious vocal style, sounding almost like a dying ogre, muttering disjointed words in a deep, monotone register, building an ever more anguished atmosphere. "Sex, God, Sex" is built on the same template, but with the addition of a deathly final chorus, in which devotion to God becomes outright sexual self-abnegation. And if sex was Gira's road to damnation in "New Mind", for Jarboe it 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 unite 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 Siouxsie-esque horror effects and driven by mechanically "metallic" rhythms, with the final chorus ("Sha-La-La-La") turning an innocent 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 lull 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, between martial cadences and apocalyptic choirs.

And when the tension has finally reached 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 envelop us in the tender melody of "Blackmail", 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 is a "real" love ("Real Love", with Gira begging God to end his ordeal: "Take me down/ Into the cold dead earth"). And it is a "blind" love ("Blind Love", with Gira playing Christ, the "cold dead man" who conquers death and rises from the tomb). What finally banishes the specters haunting the record is the solemn invocation of the title track, in which 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 the redemption of Swans, the shadow of death always lurks.

"Children Of God" seals a radical turning point for the New York band: from the brutal nihilism of their early years to fully realized sonic sequences that nonetheless keep their originality intact. As with Pere Ubu, their music is nothing less than the epitaph of industrial society and a terrible premonition of what might come after. Gira is the dark minstrel of a glacial future era, a mad priest wandering among the ruins of desolation, narrating a mechanized, agonizing humanity. Jarboe is the fairy of an ancestral tale, yearning for a return to lost innocence, to an Eden now out of reach.

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12/11/2006