siLLy puPPy Although SWANS originated on the tail end of the obscure NYC no wave scene some four decades ago, this project led by Michael Gira has exhibited an amazing staying power by leaving all the competitors in the dust while consistently reinventing the SWANS sound to transverse itself into more contemporary styles of experimental rock. While jettisoning the skronky guitar dissonance long ago and transmogrifying into a form of post-rock, SWANS unlike any other band has showcased how the no wave movement was in many ways a precursor to the world of post-rock and here in the current calendar year of 2023, Gira returns with SWANS’ 16th studio album titled THE BEGGAR.

I have been a fan of pretty much everything this band has cranked out right from the no wave industrial noise rock of 1983’s “Filth” to folk and drone fueled totalism meets post-rock on the more recent albums like “The Glowing Man” however with 2019’s “leaving meaning” i was actually left cold as Gira’s approach had shifted significantly from a hypnotic detached methodology to one that incorporated Gothic country and Neofolk however what i hated the most about that album was vocal style that sounded as if it was trying to emulate happy-go-lucky pop artists from the 50s and 60s. That album was a complete dud to many and it seemed SWANS might have run out of steam.

No such problem though as Gira hasn’t successfully navigated the decades by not paying attention to the reaction of the fans. He experienced a similar hiccough with 2010’s “My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky,” which personally i love but many did not. Apparently GIra got the memo and on THE BEGGAR returns to that same mopey vocal delivery like he just woke up from a series of bad dreams and is here to recount his experience through poetic prose set to a menagerie of post-rock, neofolk, droning, sound collages, ambience, gothic rock, avant-folk and even a bit of goth country. This time around though he succeeds in his efforts given that this formula of simplified music based on melodramatic continuity can be very fragile and any particular element skewed in any particle direction can result in a total derailment of tolerability.

I don’t know how he does it but beginning with 2012’s “The Seer,” SWANS only releases double albums or at least the modern equivalent of what would once be considered as such. THE BEGGAR is another sprawling series of tracks that collectively slink past the two hour mark at nearly 122 minutes! While not as dark and depressive as earlier SWANS albums, THE BEGGAR seems to reject the overt happy campiness of “leaving meaning” but not jettison it altogether. Gira seems to have simply refined that formula by connected it more successfully to the stylistic approaches of the past with a continuity that allows a two hour plus album to not lose its momentum. With only 11 tracks, the majority are lengthy sprawlers but in reality the second to the last track “The Beggar Lover (Three)” consumes almost 44 minutes of this album’s playing time!

What makes many SWANS albums to intriguing is that they are instantly likable with no digging required to connect to receive an instant impact but yet find many subtleties buried beneath the surface. An ominous mix of goth-tinged post-rock with ethereal atmospheres and processional cyclical loops that meander for large chunks of time, THE BEGGAR also features a lot of lap steel guitar sounds as well as many ethnic instrumentation such as the dulcimer, fujara or duduk. Gira employs seven musicians and two vocalists to bring THE BEGGAR its magical hypnotic touches and does so triumphantly.

Somehow in the modern world where attention spans have been reduced to mere blurbs, SWANS has managed to memorize the listener with lengthy sprawling musical compositions. While this album is great, the best track is the longest. At nearly 44 minutes, “The Beggar Love (Three)” has a running time of a traditional vinyl length album and yet it is the best and most hauntingly beautiful track on the entire album. SWANS is best when it is allowed to just slowly drift into a world of its own making. This hypnotic and ethereal dreamy track just perfectly ratchets up the perfect tension with a beautiful atmospheric accompaniment that works in tandem with the martial rhythmic grooves that culminates in a heftier rock sequence around the 20-minute mark. A few minutes later the music drops out altogether and becomes a series of percussive chaos and spoken word samplings. In short the track is the perfect marriage of drone, ambient, post-rock and miscellaneous sound effects. The album ends with its most energetic, “The Memorious” which exits on a fiery note.

Overall THE BEGGAR shows that SWANS is in no way of danger of burning out. Gira is has an uncanny ability to keep cranking out engaging albums that on paper sound as if they should bore you to tears. SWANS albums are very difficult to describe because words can’t really convey the depths of emotional responses that they evoke. Gira has proven time and time again that he can go against the grain at every step of the way and still provide something captivating in a manner that no other has quite latched onto. It’s hard to believe that some 41 years after SWANS was created that yet another album emerging in 2023 will surely rank right up there with other masterful creations. Is this SWANS’ best album? I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t think albums like “Children Of God” can ever be topped. Even more recent albums like “The Seer” and “To Be Kind” are more varied and interesting but there is no doubt that THE BEGGAR doesn’t not disappoint from beginning to end and for that i must applaud Michael Gira and his endless wellspring of creativity that shows no sign of letting up. Bravo!

siLLy puPPy SWANS emerged in the short-lived New York City no wave noise rock scene with their debut album “Filth” and earlier eponymous EP but in 1984 they not only released their second album “Cop” but also an extended play (EP) that didn’t really have a title at the time. It consisted of only four tracks and has been referred to “Raping A Slave” and “I Crawled” (both album tracks) but is officially referred as YOUNG GOD which is the title of the longest track, therefore it has pretty much gone down in history under that title. The fourth unfortunate track that it hasn’t been named after is “This Is Mine.” Once again SWANS dishes out a strange concoction of punk infused energy, metal tones and timbres all parading in a drone drenched stripped-down minimalism and avant-garde outrage.

Following in the bleakness and brutal nature of the “Cop” album, YOUNG GOD takes the stylistic approach to even more extreme measures offering a glimpse into the mind of the serial killer Ed Gein. The EP takes the no wave, no frills droning percussive march into even more bombastic territories as it even utilizes a chain against a metal table offering a bleaker industrial feel than “Cop” ever dared explore. Likewise, the tempos are even slower and it genuinely sounds as if the sounds that emerge evoke the darkest, most abstract and utterly violent musical offerings possible with an abrasive surreal minimalistic barbarity unlike anything ever conceived.

YOUNG GOD contains only a mere four tracks that don’t even add up to the half hour mark but in their wake leaves a barrage of emotionally bereft hypnotic parades of industrial bleakness and surreal surrender of everything familiar in musical trends of the day. Melodies are replaced by jagged torturous textures of jarring guitar distortion, arhythmic percussive drives that churn along like heart palpitations and the bleakest sewer rat perspective of sado-masochistic sonic torture sessions that incorporate downtuned dread with utter hopelessness.

While the overall effect is equivalent to “Cop,” YOUNG GODS is even more surreal and hypnotic as the guitar parts are more uniform whereas the Michael Gira’s vocals are much more emphatic and take on a more diverse repertoire of tortured prowess. The main effect of YOUNG GOD is one of disbelief as the grimy filth of the guitar and bass distortion churn along with the atypically timed rhythmic flow of the percussion. This one has been cited as a major influence to bands like Nirvana, Neurosis and Godflesh. The Swiss band The Young Gods even named themselves after it. This is about as subversively sinister as music can get before it totally becomes irregular formless noise.

This is the last bout with sheer musical bleakness for SWANS. After YOUNG GODS they would incorporate Jarboe into the band and her influence would forever change the band’s course into more diverse arenas. While the EP was never officially released beyond the initial vinyl pressings, the four tracks that appeared on it can easily be found on modern compilations of the early works. YOUNG GODS takes the unique musical lexicon that SWANS crafted in their earlier years and fleshes out only the bleakest possibilities. So intense is this stuff that more than four tracks of it and it may have caused death. Include this on the “scariest tracks of all time” list.

siLLy puPPy While many will claim that the 80s were one of the worst decades for music but i must disagree wholeheartedly since some of the most original thinking musical entities emerged from this period. On the aggressive side of the musical equation, the punk and metal that had been gaining steam in the late 70s and early 80s really took off during this period. While punk and post-punk had splintered into a gazillion subgenera, metal on the other hand was only starting to see the potential of different styles emerging from the hard rock that had developed it a decade before. Out of all this craziness came SWANS whose unique style to this day is unclassifiable as they exist in their own musical universe but was even more the case in their beginning days. This NYC band led by Michael Gira existed in a strange gray area between punk and metal although they were technically part of the short-lived no wave noise rock movement.

Their debut album “Filth” set the tone for their abrasive unrelenting assault on melody with undulating waves of distorted noise grinding in a jarring rhythmical fashion like a thousand jackhammers pounding the city streets in unison and only slightly deviating from each other until a true cacophonous din results. On their second album COP, the band of four continues this aggressive assault and takes it even further with even heavier bombastic drum and bass beats accompanied by screeching downtuned and dissonant guitar riffs along with Gira’s tortured soul vocalizations that preceded the world of black and death metal by several years. It’s no wonder that early SWANS have been cited as one of the major influences for the heavy down and dirty approach of sludge metal because the thick guitar riffs that buzz to infinity create one of the loudest albums of the early 80s as if the band recorded this in a deep industrial bunker in the darkest recesses of the cockroach filled underbellies of a post-apocalyptic world.

While many comparisons have been made with doom metal and i can honestly see those connections, i find COP is more of a unique fusion of snarling punk attitudinal posturing with heavily cranked up adrenaline inducing distortion from the guitar and bass akin to the early extreme metal of Venom and Hellhammer with a bombastic drone-like march of a souless percussive drive that hypnotizes by sheer brutal force. Part of the allure is the ambiguousness of the subject matter at hand with lyrics flirting with scenes of sexual domination in unseen corners in dimly lit dungeons. The tempo on COP is much slower than “Filth” which adds a sense of valium laden dread to the abrasiveness of the fuzzed out guitar tones grinding the eardrums into audio submission like the morbidly obese woman on the cover depicts in utter despair. COP took the art of ugliness to perfect heights as the holy trinity of audio, visual and emotional impact impaled the listener from all angles.

COP is almost universally deemed SWANS’ most brutal album and i doubt anyone could disagree once encountering this seductively repulsive sonic terror. If the guitar dissonance and vocal anguish wasn’t enough, the drum and bass experience a hypnotic repertoire that is jagged with off-kilter time signatures that succeed in disrupting melodic flow in every way possible. Both “Filth” and “Cop” as well as the two EPs of the same era are cited as a major influence on bands like Godflesh, The Young Gods and the 90s sludge gods Neurosis with an almost tribal rhythmic drive gone horribly wrong into arhythmic sado-masochistic sonic torture sessions. This is not one for the faint-hearted by any means. After this album, Gira would incorporate the feminine charm of Jarboe to the band’s sound which would change the band’s style and sound drastically. However on COP, these guys pumped out one of the most monstrous and tenebrous death marches of all the early 80s. While bleak, this stuff is morbidly beautiful in its own way as it creates its own musical lexicon.

Warthur The most melodic and accessible phase of Swans' discography came to a close with Omniscience, and whilst White Light From the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life have seen recent reissues it seems like Omniscience must stay out in the cold a little longer. That's a shame, because whilst I wouldn't call it essential Swans, it's an intriguing live journey into a musical realm that is suggested in part by those studio albums and the Burning World, and in part by the various Skin/World of Skin side project albums, ant yet not quite reached by any of them - a piece of the puzzle which stands by itself and has its own contribution to make.

Warthur A solid followup to To Be Kind, and a substantial improvement on it. Swans' post-rock sound here remains strongly influenced by other artists in this realm - substantial sections of The Cloud of Unknowing in particular make me think of this incarnation of the group as Godspeed You Black Swans! - but the musical twists and turns into other styles feel better judged and the material is less padded out. At points they go to places you never expected to visit with Swans; in particular, at one point The World Looks Red/The World Looks Back shifts gears and starts sounding booty-shakingly funky, but it somehow works within the wider context of the composition.