Why Can't I Review What I Want Any Time That I Want?
Well, the day only has twenty-four hours and there's always omething getting in the way. And there are some bands, which require a significantly bigger commitment than the average artist. But now I'll finally sit down to hopefully find at least some fitting words for one of the most important releases of the year.
SWANS - The Beggar (2CD) (2023)
Of course I already knew that there would be powerful songs on the new Swans album. I've already listened to Michael Gira's stripped down demo versions on the crowdfunding perk for it, which was last year's release "Is There Really A Mind?".
The question was of course, where he would take these skeletons in the full band arrangements. Some stayed surprisingly calm and close to the source, others grew many layers. And while the sound of Swans obviously is huge, the tracks on "The Beggar" don't engage in boundless gigantism and mostly stay in rather "normal" song format below the ten-minute-mark.
But not only in this way the album is a further step away from the new Swans routine, after "Leaving Meaning" already went into a more wordy, lyrically driven direction.
So what's different this time? First the line-up isn't as sprawling as on that album. There's a core band of familiar faces being Kristof Hahn, Dana Schechter, Phil Puleo, Christopher Pravdica and Larry Mullins as well as a couple additional instrumentations by Ben Frost, Norman Westberg and Paul Walfisch plus three female backing vocalists including Gira's wife Jennifer, who only appears prominently on one track.
That may already sound like a lot, but compared to the predecessor, which borrowed whole other bands (The Necks) it's a quite overseeable cast.
The more important evolution however lies in the production. There is a certain spaciousness and and choice of reverb on the vocals and drums, which calls back to the quiter Jarboe days in the early Nineties, re-introducing that Gothic vibe to the sound. Yet since the album alternates between creepy ballad tone and the grander ambition of the new millenium Swans, the most fitting description if we're speaking in references would be that it is a crossing of "Leaving Meaning" with "The Great Annihilator".
"The Beggar" unsurprsingly is a lot, not an album which you can put on at any given time and just quickly listen through. But it contains a lot of actually catchy and majestic ideas and just plain great songs.
The opeing with the slowly building "The Parasite" and the hypnotic groove of "Paradise Is Mine" is already enough to seal the deal. You know, whatever else the album has to offer, these tracks were already worth it. But the greatness just goes on, maybe not on the same level on each and every of the eleven tracks on two CDs, but ultimately we get Swans in all their glory. This is neither their most crushing nor monolithic work, but it combines a lot of their strengths and balances them perfectly.
The themes of "The Beggar" are decline, decay, dissolution and death, most poignantly expressed in "Michael Is Done", the aformentioned song featuring Jennifer Gira, where both of them sing about him fading away, being gone and replaced. "When Michael is gone, some other will come." No, there's no shyness about taking sarcasm too far.
All lyrics as well as the music of each track would be worth of further exploration here, but I think it has come across that I love this album, so I'll keep it to the necessary minimum of what just has to be addressed.
One track very obviously stands out, and that is the central piece of the second CD, the forty-four minutes coloss "The Beggar Lover (Three)", which really feels like its own album within the album, not only for its enormous length. So is this the return to the larger than life format of "The Seer" / "To Be Kind" / "The Glowing Man"?
Yes, but no. In a way this goes back to the abstract process of "Soundtracks For The Blind", as a collection of found sounds, samples and re-used, transformed material from the rest of "The Beggar" as well as two previous albums "Leaving Meaning" and "The Glowing Man".
So it's not a composition which started on the acoustic guitar or developed through live performances, but rather a massive studio patchwork. Huge chunks of it represent Swans at their most weird and avant-garde, yet still all this works in the same all-encompassing, sonically overwhelming way, with the same manic pummeling intensity we're used to from their post-reunion format. "The Beggar Lover" certainly feels a lot more like a handful of different pieces stitched together than one single track. Like I said: an album within an album.
It's a welcome extra tour before the album continues and closes in the recent band sound with Gira ominously narrating over the hypnotic pulse of "The Memorious".
The question was of course, where he would take these skeletons in the full band arrangements. Some stayed surprisingly calm and close to the source, others grew many layers. And while the sound of Swans obviously is huge, the tracks on "The Beggar" don't engage in boundless gigantism and mostly stay in rather "normal" song format below the ten-minute-mark.
But not only in this way the album is a further step away from the new Swans routine, after "Leaving Meaning" already went into a more wordy, lyrically driven direction.
So what's different this time? First the line-up isn't as sprawling as on that album. There's a core band of familiar faces being Kristof Hahn, Dana Schechter, Phil Puleo, Christopher Pravdica and Larry Mullins as well as a couple additional instrumentations by Ben Frost, Norman Westberg and Paul Walfisch plus three female backing vocalists including Gira's wife Jennifer, who only appears prominently on one track.
That may already sound like a lot, but compared to the predecessor, which borrowed whole other bands (The Necks) it's a quite overseeable cast.
The more important evolution however lies in the production. There is a certain spaciousness and and choice of reverb on the vocals and drums, which calls back to the quiter Jarboe days in the early Nineties, re-introducing that Gothic vibe to the sound. Yet since the album alternates between creepy ballad tone and the grander ambition of the new millenium Swans, the most fitting description if we're speaking in references would be that it is a crossing of "Leaving Meaning" with "The Great Annihilator".
"The Beggar" unsurprsingly is a lot, not an album which you can put on at any given time and just quickly listen through. But it contains a lot of actually catchy and majestic ideas and just plain great songs.
The opeing with the slowly building "The Parasite" and the hypnotic groove of "Paradise Is Mine" is already enough to seal the deal. You know, whatever else the album has to offer, these tracks were already worth it. But the greatness just goes on, maybe not on the same level on each and every of the eleven tracks on two CDs, but ultimately we get Swans in all their glory. This is neither their most crushing nor monolithic work, but it combines a lot of their strengths and balances them perfectly.
The themes of "The Beggar" are decline, decay, dissolution and death, most poignantly expressed in "Michael Is Done", the aformentioned song featuring Jennifer Gira, where both of them sing about him fading away, being gone and replaced. "When Michael is gone, some other will come." No, there's no shyness about taking sarcasm too far.
All lyrics as well as the music of each track would be worth of further exploration here, but I think it has come across that I love this album, so I'll keep it to the necessary minimum of what just has to be addressed.
One track very obviously stands out, and that is the central piece of the second CD, the forty-four minutes coloss "The Beggar Lover (Three)", which really feels like its own album within the album, not only for its enormous length. So is this the return to the larger than life format of "The Seer" / "To Be Kind" / "The Glowing Man"?
Yes, but no. In a way this goes back to the abstract process of "Soundtracks For The Blind", as a collection of found sounds, samples and re-used, transformed material from the rest of "The Beggar" as well as two previous albums "Leaving Meaning" and "The Glowing Man".
So it's not a composition which started on the acoustic guitar or developed through live performances, but rather a massive studio patchwork. Huge chunks of it represent Swans at their most weird and avant-garde, yet still all this works in the same all-encompassing, sonically overwhelming way, with the same manic pummeling intensity we're used to from their post-reunion format. "The Beggar Lover" certainly feels a lot more like a handful of different pieces stitched together than one single track. Like I said: an album within an album.
It's a welcome extra tour before the album continues and closes in the recent band sound with Gira ominously narrating over the hypnotic pulse of "The Memorious".
No doubt: Swans did it once again. This band just operates in its fundamentally own scale.
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