Swans return to unlock the doors

Swans have attempted to harness the unstoppable again for all our sakes, writes Cain Lindegreen.

Swans. The Beggar. ★★★★

"It’s a fine line between pleasure and pain/You’ve done it once you can do it again/Whatever you’ve done don’t try to explain/It’s a fine line between pleasure and pain." The Divinyls.

It’s reckless to even consider the phrase "best band in the world". Unless it’s so glaringly obvious that it becomes arguing over who number two is. Re-enter Swans. Who end the discussion by slowly, but firmly, closing the door behind them, engaging the locks, cranking up the temperature and twisting the screws.

After the best part of two decades of trying to scare the paint off the walls of every venue they set foot in, Swans retreated. Who could blame them? Exorcising demons is exhausting, it requires direct communication with them. It felt like Michael Gira (the spine, brain and heart of Swans) fought the foul beast to a bloody, visceral draw. It seemed fair to take some time to tend the wounds and reset.

Then, out of nowhere, in 2010 Swans re-emerged with My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky. They had a whole new plan. This time they were going to hypnotise the devil, transfix it and make it dance to their tune. This wasn’t music as enjoyment, or even the old chestnut about life and death. This felt bigger again, more important than even that. The re-energised Swans seemed locked in a battle to restore the basic sanity of humans by restoring the sanctity of The Prophet.

Then on the next album, 2012’s two hour long The Seer, they got better again. Combining the battle-hardened guitars of Gira and Norman Westburg, the turbulent lap steel of Kristof Hahn, add keys, the fittest man ever on drums and Thor Harris on other things (once seen playing a hammer dulcimer and trombone at the same time). We have seven man army, The Best Band in the World. If mountain ranges made music to soundtrack planets boxing, the three albums Swans made between 2012-2016 are it. Songs that break the half hour mark, crescendos on top of crescendos. Bunches of punches and punches in bunches, as the man said. Those records felt like living in a violent storm system. In a good way.

2019’s Leaving Meaning found Gira stepping back from the brink. A Swans album you could conceivably play during a dinner party. Then, Covid. Some of us made bread, some watched ALL the movies. The new Swans album, The Beggar, lets us know what Swans and Michael Gira did with the time. They plotted.

Now, 2023, Swans hit back with the next two-hour jaunt, The Beggar. Once again Gira and his unmerry band have made an album that works like a film. First track, The Parasite, lays out the theory, we are the parasite, the earth is the host. Everyone and everything is disconnected. "When the revelation comes/does it erase the host that lives?" Then it gets really serious and heavy. Until on the last song, The Memorious, language seems to fall apart entirely, Gira seems to speak in tongues, in the midst of total collapse. Swans know what we expect and crave. We yearn for the part where the whole band lock in and go BOOM CHA BOOM CHA BOOM CHA until the portal opens or everyone is too tired to go on. So, perversely, here they pile on the restraint, where To Be Kind pounded at your brain like endless roadworks. The Beggar, finds Swans ruminating over the field of engagement after the fight.

Not as overwhelmingly monolithic as the preceding albums. The Beggar forsakes none of the infernal groove that marks Swans as blues innovators rather than godforsaken noise-niks. There is a luminescent light here and it doesn’t creep in from the edges. It explodes through the middle, turning what earlier would have remained in the shadows into vibrant, perfectly defined objects. Where once Swans made soundtracks for (the blind) descents into hell, here it’s more like the sound of heaven’s gate finally opening and being told "That was hard work, come on in, you deserve this".

So now Gira sounds more at peace. Not happy, it’s still Michael Gira. More ensconced in acceptance, the war is over and despite Swans’ superhuman effort to save us, we lost. Or is that too nihilistic? Perhaps Gira is offering us glimpses of different possible futures. One where the parasite hollows out the host, leaving it unable to feel or think, a husk ready to collapse. Others where we, just as Swans do themselves, harness our powers into something unstoppable. Something so undeniable that the much anticipated transcendence becomes inevitable. Something so goddamn beautiful that to even engage with it is to risk upending our perspective of what sound might strive towards. If there was ever art to get lost in, to obsess over the details of, this is it. Music that throws 100 keys on the table. 100 keys that unlock 100 doors. Behind each one, something that could change your life. If you can find a way to let it in.

If you can find: The Swans documentary Where Does a Body End. Order the Blu-Ray or find it online. Please pay for it.