Aural Aggravation

Young God Records – 23rd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Swans are back – again. This is no surprise: they released – as has become standard form – a limited edition demos CD, Is There Really A Mind? through the website as a fundraiser to pay for the album’s recording and release. All ten of the songs which appeared there have made it to the finished album, but, more often than not, in aa rather different form. Unusually, though, the bare-bones demos didn’t all start life as brief acoustic sketches which expanded to twenty-minute sprawlers exploding with extended crescendos: the shapes of the songs were realised early on, and in several cases, the final versions are actually shorter than the drafts. And while Gira hinted at a seismic shift following the gargantuan blow-out of The Glowing Man, heralding the arrival of a new era with Leaving Meaning – and it’s true that the shape of the band has been very different, not least of all with mainstay Norman Westberg and Thor Harris both stepping back to being contributors rather than a core members, Kristof Hahn remains – Swans remains very much ultimately Gira’s vehicle. And so it is that for all of the changes, The Beggar is clearly very much a Swans album, and sits comfortably in the domain of their body of work.

There does very much seem to be an arc when it comes to Swans releases, rather than any rapid shifts, particularly since their 2010 comeback, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, whereby the songs grew incrementally longer and more sprawling and the crescendos more drawn out, fewer, and further apart. And so it is that The Beggar follows the more minimal sound of Leaving Meaning, and, like its predecessor, it’s a comparatively succinct statement, at least by Swans standards in the last decade – at least, discounting ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’, an album-length track which is absent from the album, and occupies the majority of disc two on the CD. This track is, in some ways, contentious: does it even belong on the album, or should it have been released as a standalone work? The album minus ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’ is still an expansive work, but has a certain flow and sense of existing as a cohesive document. And so it feels like there are almost two different albums here:

As the album’s ‘taster’ tune, the twitchy, trippy, eternally-undulating ‘Paradise is Mine’ indicated, Gira’s compositions on The Beggar are constructed around heavy repetition. This is to be expected: it’s been Gira’s style since day one. The first song, ‘The Parasite’, strips right back to nothing around the mid-point to find Gira acappella, imploring ‘come to me, feed on me’ in a menacing low-throated rasp. And as Gira questions ‘is there really a mind?’ in the psychedelic droning loops of ‘Paradise is Mine’ the tension increases and you start to feel dizzy. and perhaps a little nauseous. This pit-of-the-stomach churn is something that Swans have long been masters of, although quite how it manifests has changed over time: back in the days of Filth, Cop, and Greed, it was sheer force. More recently, it was woozy, nagging repetitions that lurch like a boat on a bobbing tide.

‘Los Angeles: City of Death’ returns to the style and form of The Great Annihilator – a three-minutes hard-punching gloom folk song. After the previous incarnation’s ever-longer workouts, it’s an absolute revelation, and a joy to be reminded that despite the work of the last decade or so, Gira can still write tight songs that you can actually get a grip on and really get into. ‘Unforming’ is a soft country drone, which finds Gira crooning cavernously over slide guitar, and it’s reminiscent of some of the more tranquil moments of Children of God.

‘I’m a shithead unforgiven… I’m an insect in your bedclothes…’ Gira drones on the ten-minute title track. For all of the artistic progress and evolution over the decades, Gira is still chained to the tropes of self-loathing and the darkest, most self-destructive introspection, and this is dolorous, doomy, and bleak …and then about four minutes in, the drums crash in and the sound thickens and they plug into one of those nagging grooves that simply immerses you and carries you upwards on a surge of sound. ‘My love for you will never end’, Gira moans, ever the subjugate, before the vocals conclude with an anguished, wordless strangled gargle as the riff kicks back in and swells to a monumental scale seemingly from nowhere.

‘No More of This’ is mellow and almost uplifting, both sonically and in its message – at least until near the end, when Gira reels off a list of farewells, and as much as ‘Ebbing’ seems to be about drowning, it’s a sliver of sunny-sounding psychedelic folk. And then ‘The Memorious’ hits that dizzying swirl of repetition that feels like a kind of torture. It’s hard to really articulate just how there can be music that makes you want to puke because it’s so woozy, wibbly. It’s the sonic equivalent of watching Performance. You don’t need to take a trip to take a trip.

‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’ represents a massive detour that does and doesn’t sit within the flow of the album. It’s either the penultimate track, or an appendix, depending the format of your choice. However you approach it, this is drone on an epic scale. Five minutes into ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’, which starts out a trickle, with a robotic female spoken word narrative, everything just goes off – mostly drums, but also noise. When this tapers away, we’re left with the sound of sirens, ominous drones, and then after some hypnotic droning, there’s another monster surge, a nagging guitar motif riding atop a thumping beat and heavy swell of drone. It soon crackles into a grand wheeze of electronica, And a detonating wall of noise, and at the end, it all collapses. Around the eighteen-minute mark it really hits a heavy groove and blows you away.

The Beggar is certainly not the kind of heavy of Swans early releases, but it’s still heavy. It may not possess the sledgehammer force of the original. It’s beyond strong.

Once again, Swans have produced an album that’s more than an album, more than anything.

AA