Swans - Birthing Review
Swans continue to be back. The beasts are foreboding & powerful on what might be their last studio effort yet. Step into the world of Swans again.
Swans are monolithic. The chant-at-the-beginning-of-time lyricism that Michael Gira so often uses is monolithic. Their song lengths are monolithic. In fact, it's a miracle that these monoliths have so much depth and texture to them. You can see why the monkeys in 2001 went mad for monoliths.
It wouldn't be the same without these core components. One could argue that their sound: expansive, brutal, majestic is their defining trait, but I would argue that their titles, covers, song lengths, and mere vibe has much more to do with their monolithicity than their stadium-detonating sound. Not everyone has had the privilege of being deafened by them in person, so we must assume that most people receive Swans mainly via headphones. And due to headphone manufacturers' tireless efforts to stop us from deafening ourselves, it is unlikely that most people experience Swans as M. Gira would intend.
Therefore, we must assume that the majority of Swans's "monolithicness" comes from their song lengths and other aesthetic tricks. Think about it: would Swans feel as monolithic if had a little rabbit on the cover? Or if they sang about being a little kid? Well, if you know that’s exactly what they’ve done before, you’ll know it doesn’t matter what they do. They can sing about anything, do anything, and the weight of their music is always pounding.
In this album, however, the weight finally gets too much for this reviewer to bear, at least for a while. The first few tracks, which already clock in at about an hour, are quite similar in tone, without too much in the way of textural breaks. Sure, Birthing comes with a section in which it slowly fades out, only to have the full Swans rug-pull delivered at 120dB but that’s pretty much it. Birthing shows that the success of their most acclaimed albums (Soundtracks for the Blind, To Be Kind) came from the things which broke up the monolithic tracks, not the tracks themselves. In the 63-minute section between The Healers and Birthing, there’s no let-off that feels like a full shift. Swans loom, at their instruments, ready to turn your eardrums back into a mass of jelly.
Soundtracks for the Blind had plenty of interludes that signified “this masterpiece is over, let me treat you to some nonsense so that by the time we’re done, you’re not cooked from the inside out”, and To Be Kind built on this by having the nonsense-interludes become their own fully-fledged things, particularly Oxygen being a career highlight in itself. On Birthing though, Swans build and build so constantly that after the first hour, everything interesting about the textures of the first two songs has already receded into the very depths of your mind, forming a sort of Swans-pureé. Even when we get a little bit of breathing room with Red Yellow, it turns out that it’s just a shorter version of the same dynamics we got in the previous three tracks, and offers minimal respite.
Perhaps this is intentional. I’ve always thought that it’s very difficult to ride the line between intensity and fatigue. Certain subgenres of metal feel like the equivalent of watching the static between TV channels to me. It’s exhausting trying to find some sort of ‘thing’ within, there’s no pattern, no nothing. Guardian Spirit is much the same, with an inexplicable hole about two-thirds of the way through the song, and has some interesting lyrics, all of which are in the traditional Swans vein of Michael Gira acting as some sort of malevolent entity, or a god, or some supernatural force beyond the control of the subject of the lyrics “In my universe, your future is last.”
Things begin to shift with The Merge, which is utterly incredible right at the start. Intense death-metal drums, a child’s voice (a Swans trope by now), and the drums and bass slowly turn into this absolutely filthy bassline, with some screeching guitars above. It feels like the soundtrack to a crime drama, with the absent-minded whistling and suspenseful guitars. Eventually, the death-metal kicks kick back in, and the latter half of the song is more reminiscent of something off of Leaving Meaning, haunted & repetitive acoustic guitars coupled with Gira’s metrical croon. Beautiful.
Then comes Rope (Away). I’ve always been of the opinion that Swans do a good outro, To Be Kind lands itself in my favourite songs of all time, it’s like being killed and then being revived, and then being killed again, just to be revived again. You get this beautiful textural drone for about fourteen entire minutes, not a second wasted, and then it all drops out, revealing this village-parade backing, strange whimsical horns and pipes, plus twinkly pianos. But above all, it’s Gira’s voice, “And where has Alice gone?” odes to the departed. They’re not mystical, Gira determines that they are merely “…away, away, away and gone.” and in other bands, that might be seen as downbeat, materialistic, just plain painful, but in this twisted world that Swans have created with the “lust” and “disgust”, thinking “Does it endlessly end, in the end?”, perhaps being “away and gone” might be just the biggest break of them all. Does it matter what you’ve been through, three crushing songs in a row, does it matter that you jumped in your seat when the drums on The Merge kicked in? Does it matter that you’re two hours on, having witnessed Swans do exactly what they do best, and right at the end, they decide that what they do best is to not exist?
Swans, as I have said, are monolithic. But their monolithic nature comes from what happens between the intensity, whether it’s briefly in the middle of a song, or for thirteen years following Soundtracks for the Blind their magic is only possible because it lasts, and then it stops.