Aural Aggravation

Christopher Nosnibor

The last tour of Swans’ current iteration, drawing the curtain on a succession of albums – and tours – which have been truly immense in every way: the build-up felt like the end of an era. The event itself, perhaps less so. At one point, someone calls out a request. “We don’t do that,” Gira explains, in a kindly manner. He seems pretty relaxed tonight, and smiles a fair bit. No-one in the band gets bollocked or scowled at, and they all seem to be having a pretty good time.

But no, they certainly don’t do ‘that’. You don’t go to see Swans expecting to hear choice guts from their extensive back catalogue. You don’t even go expecting to hear songs, at least not in any recognisable form. The versions of recorded songs bear only limited resemblance to their studio counterparts, twisted, stretched, and otherwise evolved while on the road to a point whereby they’re almost new songs entirely. Recent shows have seen the band playing sets spanning a full two and a half hours, while only featuring six songs.

Before we come to Swans, Jessica Moss, who, amidst an extensive catalogue of work over the course of a lengthy career, is best known for her contribution to Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and being part of the whole Godspeed You! Black Emperor milieu. Tonight, she plays a rendition of her latest album, An Unfolding, in its entirety, and it’s breathtaking. Her nuanced violin and vocal work is augmented with booming, resonant bass tones. There’s a lot of yakking at the bar and further back in the 1,000 capacity, sold-out venue, where the house light stay up toward the rear of the room for the duration of the night, but for those of us in the front two-thirds, it’s a spellbinding experience, which perfectly sets the tone for the main event.

Moss’ half-hour set is over by around 8:40, and Swans, after a few brief checks, take to the stage around ten minutes later. Gira politely asks that there are no cell phones – “at least not where I can see them”, before he begins strumming a monotonous at two strings. He does so for what feels like an eternity. Or perhaps not. When Swans play, time takes on a different meaning, and it’s been a feature of this current iteration that the songs evolve and elongate over the course of the extensive tours, transforming and transmogrifying over the weeks and months on the road. They’ve been touring Birthing and this ‘farewell’ for a fair while now, although the set on the most recent leg has only featured ‘The Merge’ from said album. With ‘Paradise is Mine’, from The Beggar, and ‘A Little God in My Hands’, from To Be Kind, this is as close to a retrospective set as you’re likely to get, but none of these songs much like the studio versions, and half the set therefore features material which is either new or so far removed that it’s been retitled as well as restructured. But as I say, you don’t come to a Swans show for the songs. You come for the experience. And what an experience it is.

It’s fair to say that there is simply no other band like Swans. Their reputation for extreme volume is only part of the story, a piece of the equation. Older fans who saw them in the 80s love to regale with tales of people throwing up, passing out, and so on, and that they’re pretty tame these days, and I have no reason to believe that these are purely apocryphal. Gira just can’t do quiet: even his solo acoustic sets playing smaller venues circa 2003 / 2004 were fucking punishing.

Some time in, Gira downs his guitar and stands up, turning to face the band, and flails his arms as if experiencing some kind of rapture or episode. But every gesture is a signal, from which the band members – there are six of them, plus Gira – and his near-psychotic choreography guides them through ebbs and flows, to ever greater, more intense crescendos. It’s maybe half an hour before the full drum kit kicks in, and I feel my nostrils vibrate with the sheer quantity of air displaced from the speakers. It’s transcendental, euphoric.

A number of people who had started the set near me in the front row dissolved. I didn’t really notice when: like almost everyone else, I was simply transfixed. And yet, this was by no means loud by Swans standards: while I can’t claim to have witnessed the nauseating brutality of their early years, or the notorious punishment of the Burning World tour (ironic that their gentlest album, released on a major label, should have been served by a tour of such infamous volume… or perhaps not, perhaps it was a statement to prove that they hadn’t sold out), their shows at Leeds Stylus in 2016 and 2017 were something else – something so intensely physical, it hard to find the words. Then again, on their last visit to Leeds, playing at The Belgrave, I found myself thinking ‘this isn’t so loud’ but before long finding myself dizzy and wondering quitter where that immense noise had grown from. And this is perhaps an indication of how they’ve evolved. The bludgeoning force is still very much present, not least of all with two basses and the return of Norman Westberg to the lineup – surely one of the world’s most patient and understated guitarists, content to stand, not playing for ten to fifteen minutes, before battering away at one or two chords and thirty BPM for the next fifteen minutes, creating noise and texture rather than doing the conventional ‘guitarist’ thing – but now it’s more subtle, growing building, slowly, so slowly. A tweak here and there, another player adds a later, and while you’ve been watching the dynamics of the two bassist and Gira’s windmilling, the volume has increased threefold and your ribcage is rattling and your brain is slowly scrambling. Kristof Hahn does things with lap-steel that is beyond comprehension, cranking out squalling, screaming walls of noise – but there isn’t a weak element in the lineup. They each bring something unique, and the collective output is something else.

If this is the end of Swans doing big band, big noise stuff, then they have certainly delivered a finale of spectacular proportions. And whatever comes next, we look forward with bated breath.