Rarely I find difficult to approach to a musical material and find the right words to express feelings and thoughts. This is the case of Michael Gira’s Swans, a band dead and resurrected several times and devoted to a nihilism that intimidates the willing listener. The tormented post punk played by his band has always exercised on me repulsion and fascination at the same time, because it has the capacity to put you in front of your miseries and try to find a way to save yourself.
Disturbed personality, with a difficult childhood and an adolescence passed as a wanderer often altered by drugs, Gira found his way to stay alive in music since 1982 when the adventure with Swans begun. His vision of life was based on power relations without any empathy and his music, an obscure mixture of punk and new wave, was the expression of this vision. After Swans are Dead (2003) the experience seemed to be at an end, as his leader suggested. But after some years releases like The Seer, To Be Kind, The Glowing Man and the last The Beggar (2023) gave the band a new life made of oneiric ballads and long instrumental tracks in which the voice is only a sign and the music is always hovering between destruction and salvation.
Birthing (out for Young God Records) looks like a confirmation that Gira still wants to produce disturbing and hypnotizing music, although he said that it is the last “big sound” album: almost two hours for seven magniloquent songs in which Gira’s voice is like a psalmodic mantra and noises create the atmosphere of something close to happen.
“The Healers” starts with two notes of guitar repeated on a layer of synths and a chorus, while Gira declaims verses of and protection and relief: “And I will punish those that hurt her And I will comfort those that nurture”. Halfway the song takes a noisy road made of an obsessive drumming and lancinating guitars, while in the final part the storm calms down for a while to become a tornado of noise. Mystical, gloomy, irresistible. “I Am A Tower” in 20 minutes rides all the elements of Swans music, from noise to constant repetitions, from stinging guitars to a chanting singing (“I, alone, will fix it”) in an apparent chaos where verses of hope are interspersed by apocalyptic words: “And all you millions of fools, down in your swimming pools, I am collecting heads, I am the last man left”. “Birthing” arrives as a pagan ritual in which distorted guitars create tension to leave room then to some delicate moments underlined by synths and faint celestial sounds. The album develops in other long suites that leave the listener in front of the choice to surrender or resist to this swirl of sound.
Birthing is a difficult album; surely fans will appreciate, for the other the advice is to approach with caution to a very incendiary material.
