A birth, a rebirth, a death, an end, a beginning. This is Swans. It feels as if it is always Swans. There is a death and a rebirth within every album, and sometimes over the arc of a few albums. Here it is more insistent. More obvious. A promise from Michael Gira to the rest of us.
After sketching the sonic beginnings while touring, Gira gathered the flock together; Phil Puleo, Kristof Hahn, Dana Schechter, Christopher Pravdica, Larry Mullins, and Norman Westberg. Then the building, shaping, creating, moving began. This is an epic journey into shadows and melodics, noise and anthemic chaos, yearning and ecstasy. Birthing.
The first song, “The Healers”, clocks in at almost twenty-two minutes, and feels like an album in and of itself. Fluid and dynamic, enchanting, beautiful, disturbing, ethereal, heavy, and discordant. This album is going to be a trek. Seven songs, the shortest being around seven minutes, but this journey is worth it.
After this, there will be something else, but it will be different. It will be simpler, but it will grow out of this.
On “I Am A Tower” Gira speaks out with hazy Jim Morrison echoes, calling out for different poetics, darker visions. The music moans and shudders like October atmospherics before morphing into a soft driving drone that pushes you towards the world.
The title track hits, light and lilting. There is always hope buried somewhere within Swans albums, and here it is. Always with sadness, though. It rises and rouses. And it manages to balance between beautiful and bludgeoning, somehow.
The demented carnival ride of “Guardian Spirit”. The evil techno sludge bad-trip vibes of “The Merge” hitting like some glitched up Melvins collaborating with an Einsturzende Neubauten nightmare. And then the finale, the nineteen minute “Rope Away”. It hits just right. A bright sorrowful yet strangely comforting and uplifting farewell. The birthing is complete. We begin again.
