by Devin Birse (@devvvvi.b)
Birthing glows as much as it growls. Like most of Swans post-revival work, it’s a behemoth of an album, loaded with nightmare Americana, titanic drones, and garbled preacher vocals to an extent we now know what to expect. In the near decade and a half since Michael Gira’s group of noisenik’s par excellence climbed back out of the darkness Swans have reinstated themselves as the world’s chief sonic extremists. The return phase in the band's existence served to transform them from merely an incredibly important and influential group to a relevant one. The groundwork they laid across the 2010s with their trilogy of The Seer, To Be Kind, and The Glowing Man wasn’t merely impressive; it was career-defining. The sort of stuff no band that old is expected to do. There is a slight sense for their past two albums that Swans are back to doing what's expected. The initial shock of their steaming bath of drone folk has now become all too familiar. Birthing leans into that familiarity, comfort, and warmth with a new purpose and intelligence. Through combining the old with the new, it shines a light over the final dim corners of Gira’s twistedly beautiful world.
In the lead-up to its release, Gira declared Birthing “my final foray [as producer/impresario] into the all-consuming sound worlds that have been my obsession for years.” It’s a grand statement. While Swans have quit before, this isn’t the same. It’s a decisive shutting of the door to the enveloping mix of gothic grandeur and Branca-totalism that has marked out the band's work. With this context, there’s a sense of importance slightly lacking from other recent Swans releases. Here it is, the end of the era. Despite this, Birthing doesn’t necessarily chart new sounds so much as crystallise what's come before. A grand firing-on-all-cylinders epilogue for Swans, with hints of the future, the past and the present slithering through the album.
At its core, Birthing is a fusion of the revival era’s crunching, droney post-rock with the various shades of goth that marked the band's 90s input. Opener “The Healers” bridges spacey drones with the coddling tones of neo-folk through its aching choral backing vocals and light weeps from the slide guitar. Then at eight minutes, the song shifts into a bleak void of industrial drumming and daunting post-punk bass as Gira mumbles out a series of creeping “mau maus.” From there it shifts into a mix of droning goth rock and militant bass funk, before near evaporating into a grand choral epilogue. “The Healers” encapsulates Birthing; across its twenty minutes it shifts and darts through paths the band has tread before whilst conjoining them to angles and approaches even older. The result is music that sounds Swans to a near-memetic capacity. Never has Gira appeared more aware and in control of what he can do and play with. The result is an album deeply immersed in the Swans language without lingering in it. Any fears of Birthing being an entirely retrospective album are unfounded. Instead, what's come before is being used to chart out one final voyage.
With only one track under the 10-minute mark (and most pushing twenty), Birthing is deeply dedicated to the long-form epics that were once merely album centrepieces. With the pressure for those songs to be marked moments now gone, the band tinkers with them more than ever, skimming the krautrock-indebted progression of previous works in favour of more esoteric flair. Lead single “I Am A Tower” lingers half its runtime in a glorious shroud of the neoclassical drone before transforming into a rousing stomper with a guitar weep that sounds like a phantom echo of the riff in Bowie’s “Heroes.” Dashes of minimalism and post-minimalism echo across song intros with the title track shimmering mellotron notes contrasting its aching drone. “Merge” plays a similar trick. but this time through a rush of whirring electronica and locust-like production before slinking into a violent groove. Yet where these tracks begin rarely predicts their end. A shocking blast of noise or a free jazz sax squeal are just as likely conclusions as a gentle guitar strum. More than ever, Swans allow the light and the dark to mingle, the journeys the songs take the listener down appearing more esoteric and complex without losing their familiarity.
Even with two weeks of regular listening Birthing proves an album hard to grasp. Part of this is its place within Swans' catalogue as Gira’s final attempt to wrangle the sound he has been wrestling with for over four decades now. It leaves a listener eager to place the album as some sort of statement or conclusion, but Swans has never been a statement band. Rather they’re a group forever grasping and transmuting the deep shadows of our collective conscious, their music a soundtrack to the moment a darkness’ true form is revealed by a blast of light. Birthing feels like a final soundtrack, Gira taking every part of what has come before to capture Swans and its sound one last time. It’s not the band's most innovative album but it’s one of their most tender and beautiful. A graceful combination of the experimental journeys of the last decade and a half with the sensitivity and serenity of the band's neo-folk opuses. Initially, I found it hard to believe that these songs all began with just Gira and his acoustic guitar but on further listens it makes more sense. Birthing is a close album, an oddly comforting and sincere one. In the album's closing moments, Gira sings “Away away away” as if he's letting Swans itself drift out to sea. It’s a quiet closer for a perpetually loud band but Swans were never the sought to end with a bang or a scream. Though this isn’t a whimper but rather a soft deep purr, echoed out by an aging lion as it drifts off into sleep.