The Quietus

The history of Swans comes in eras, chunks of time that are readily demarcated by fans and critics, noted for the differences in sound and the cast of characters surrounding Michael Gira. The lines eclipsing these eras, however, weren’t always clearly defined by the musician himself, instead imposed on a life and catalog full of grandiose ideas, turmoil, and persuasive emotions. Considering the more than 30 years of his career, that’s only natural. Some eras were predicated upon physical response, overpowering listeners with serrating, booming, disruptive music. At other times, Gira hunkered down with an acoustic guitar, producing more directly intimate, almost spiritual folk music. In this latest incarnation of Swans, he’s undertaken a sort of “gonzo” approach, fusing those two halves into one glorious mess. And now as that era draws to a close, Gira was stuck having to figure out how to conclude such an endless statement. Fittingly, he does so by sticking to the grandiose duality, and not really concluding much of anything. But then again, Swans has never been a band for tying things in pretty bows.

When looking to examples of this maximalist songwriting, it’s only natural to first consider the major centerpieces of the two preceding albums of this trilogy, the title track to The Seer and ‘Bring the Sun / Toussaint L’Ouvertur’ from To Be Kind. And while those behemoth pieces show the overwhelming nature of these performers, there’s more to the style than sheer volume or size. Even in their briefer moments, these albums offer an extensive essay in refined primitivism, a seemingly contradictory union of some of rock’s structural conventions with a bloodthirsty tonal elasticity that refuses to be contained. It is simultaneously intensely personal music (excoriating and abrasive, yet only to scrub away the muck built up over the true core of humanity) and something that stretches beyond the personal, reaching a place of communal entrancement.

Much like religious experience, the constellations of songs here (and their brethren on the two prior albums) rely on an intensely relatable core, a simple idea or feeling sizzling at the center that anyone can attach to. From there, the instrumentalists ripple out in meditative layers, never covering over or distracting from it, but rather reinforcing. Take, for example, the twenty-minute ‘Frankie M’; the song deals so clearly in addiction in a way that listeners can sympathize with even if they’ve never done heroin, opium, methedrine, and MDMA, thanks to the almost nauseating battering of the music.

Moreover, that connectivity is driven by some of the most primal feelings: life and death, kill or be killed. There’s a lot of violence in this record, always approached in a way that feels “provoked” by the music, backed into a corner until sharp teeth are bared and claws drawn. “Break a glass/ Stab his eye/ Choke his neck/ Nothing's left,” goes ‘Frankie M’ once the drugs and droning have done their work. “The mouth of death still calls my name/ I'll beat him on his face/ And I stab with all my strength,” Gira’s wife, Jennifer, sings on ‘When Will I Return?’, after finding herself attacked and “splayed” on the curb.

However, that predation and violence, especially regarding that latter song, takes on a strange resonance considering the widely publicised accusations leveled at Gira by songwriter Larkin Grimm. Last year, Grimm accused Gira of rape, taking advantage of his role as mentor and label boss in a sexual encounter. The precise details of their relationship and that situation are beyond my purview as a critic, but their proximity to an album featuring a song written for his wife to sing about sexual assault is undeniably disconcerting. While this is contextual, and not inherent to the album, it’s impossible to shake entirely from the back of my head. As a woman. As a human.

The question then becomes to what extent a piece of art must be tied to the circumstances surrounding its release. In our digital era, it seems unlikely that anything can be viewed in isolation, unshaded by its context. However unfair it may be, no issue can be excised and considered on its own without the five “If you like this story, you might also like…” links to related stories. We’re suffocating underneath a paper trail of accountability.

As an individual, I might focus exclusively on these allegations or I might not at all. As a critic, I feel that choice is complicated; to ignore it would deny my instincts, but to focus on it denies the validity of a powerful piece of artistic expression and sets a precedent that could undermine the artistic process. That might seem self-serving and overstated, but in the Internet age, that sort of conversation stays with a person, and each and every one of us contributes to the way in which it is seen.

To that end, the attempts at accountability and transparency (at least theoretically) with which Gira has approached the conversation shade the analysis of the album as well. He has responded to Grimm’s accusations, admitting to fault even if it’s not exactly what she continues to detail - her truth. He wrote a song that deals realistically and hauntingly with violence against women, one which his wife repeats with fiery insistence: “I'm alive.” To that end, The Glowing Man isn’t sunk by the weight of the situation; appropriately, the scars aren’t covered in the trilogy’s drive towards transcendence, the entire messy conversation of life on full display.

On the shambling, hypnotic ‘The World Looks Red/The World Looks Black’, Gira’s vocal takes sweep and creak like monastic chants, a constant guitar jangle at the back corners of the mix pinging the brain. “Walk on my fingertips,” he intones. “The weight of my body is too much to bear.” The song rocks and spins, a physical manifestation of meditation in which mindfulness of the body, however painful, pushes away the world. On ‘Cloud Of Unknowing’, a sludgy rhythm drills into the skull as Gira repeats a simpler mantra: “I am, I am, I am, I am.” This over-stretched delivery has become a staple of this era of Swans, Gira getting to essential truths through repetition of a simple phrase until it becomes mind-blowing, all over a constantly churning, magma-like musical core. Opener ‘Cloud Of Forgetting’ grinds on ferocious guitar and Thor Harris’ percussive squall, erupting into orgasmic motion, a steely force field of orchestral menace.

Three albums of explosive, physical spirituality had to come to some sort of conclusion, and with The Glowing Man, that comes in the form of the relatively unrestricted, undefeated and optimistic ‘Finally, Peace’. Michael and Jennifer unite for more harmonies, this time with a brighter mantra. “The glory is mine,” they repeat in a near-chorale march. Of course, this builds to a droning, eastern blend of tonal oms, as a Swans record is wont to do; they don’t see a world that can offer an entirely sweet conclusion. But for a moment there, Swans revel in a pop-ish piano-driven bounce. All of this exorcism and meditation has come to something, even if it’s not true transcendence.

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Pitchfork 81

Musical careers rarely end with clean resolutions, which makes sense given that bands usually don’t get to plan their own exits. And even when they do, farewell gestures tend to leave a lingering taste of anticlimax. The Glowing Man, the final album by the current lineup of Swans, marks an exception to this rule, much as Swans have broken pretty much all modern rock norms.

From 1982 to 1997, and then again from 2010 until now, Swans leader Michael Gira has charted a fiercely uncompromising path. Not unlike King Crimson mastermind Robert Fripp, he has re-invented Swans several times, with new iterations bearing little resemblance to previous ones. Along the way, Swans have drawn from no wave, art-rock, industrial, sludge, drone, folk, and more while flagrantly disregarding genre boundaries. Gira built Swans by subjecting audiences to unrelenting torrents of abrasion, but latter-day Swans tunes are built like spiderwebs: delicate enough to blow on, yet surprisingly durable against wind and rain, elegant but dotted with gruesome shapes in a complex, shifting geometry. Who knows what they will become next; Gira says he plans to continue under the Swans name “with a revolving cast of collaborators” and with far less emphasis on touring.

On The Glowing Man, for almost two hours, Swans say again with whispers what they once roared. However, while their previous albums The Seer and To Be Kind merged groove, intensity and riffs into a new form of orchestral rock, The Glowing Man is more slight, constantly on the verge of fading into the ether. Gira and co. spend much of the album suspended in a kind of ambient trance, scarcely growing louder even as their parts grow denser and hint at more emotional volatility. The sum is deceptively sedate but far from an easy listen—at times, it’s akin to sitting next to a still pool and watching for ripples on the surface.

On this album (as in real life), love grows like an ivy that entwines with suffering. On “When Will I Return?,” for example, Gira's spouse Jennifer sings about her assault experience: “His hands are on my throat/My key is in his eye/I’m splayed here on some curb/Shards of glass—a starry night.” Gira wrote the song well before assault allegations against him surfaced earlier this year, but hearing it in the episode's wake amplifies the song's unsettling effect and provokes a slew of difficult questions. On the 25-minute “Cloud of Unknowing,” he denounces a “Jesus feeler, zombie sucker, zombie healer, monster eater,” a post-traumatic residue lingering in the air like a static charge. About five minutes in, a Mellotron bubbles up courtesy of regular collaborator Bill Rieflin as droning strings bob, weave, and disappear like firefly lights. The resemblance to Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” is uncanny but passing. (Rieflin, a onetime drummer for Nine Inch Nails and King Crimson, plays multiple instruments on the record, including bastardized jazz piano on the opening track “Cloud of Forgetting.”)

Likewise Gira’s vocals on “Unknowing” vaguely recall an Arabic call to prayer while percussionist Thor Harris’ church bells ring in panic and the noise-improvisational cellist Okkyung Lee contributes a sharp solo with anxious overtones. In her own career, Lee has arguably done for the cello what Jimi Hendrix did for the guitar, turning unexpected sound patterns into graceful forms we can understand. It’s a testament to how flexible Swans have become that a force of nature like Lee simply blends into the music rather than disrupting it.

When Gira announced this Swans incarnation would end, he referred to “LOVE” (in all caps) as his reason for working with the musicians on The Glowing Man. Of course, Gira was not talking about the over-sweetened form we often get in pop music. The love in his music is as terrible as it is beautiful, a wrenching act of spiritual determination. Swans make this sound effortless, though, in a fitting end to a remarkable chapter of their career.

Drowned In Sound 70

Much of the success of the Swans reunion has been the sextet’s ability to simultaneously up the stakes across all departments. Comparisons with the group’s earliest material might well be unnecessary, but it’s hard to dismiss the idea that somehow this incarnation of Swans has managed to be heavier and more uncompromising whilst simultaneously being more spiritual and – at times – melodic than any other Swans line-up. Last time Swans released an album – two years ago – I wrote on these pages that they were undoubtedly 'the greatest rock group on the planet'. In this regard To Be Kind reiterated what its predecessor, The Seer, had already proved and what, in turn, the first post-reactivation Swans album – My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky – had hinted at. No half measures, no easy rides: that’s been the story of the Swans discography, and over the last six years Gira has emphasised that with aplomb.

Having acknowledged the band’s undiminished power and uncompromising stance, however, there is a need for some measuring of expectations upon the release of The Glowing Man. Is there really enough room for another definitive statement from this line-up? The answer, frankly, is probably a negative one. The Glowing Man does everything that listeners – by now – will be expecting from a twenty-first century Swans record. The length is the first obvious indicator of this. Eight tracks spread across two whole hours almost takes this into Sunn O))) gig territory. Instrumentally, meanwhile, there are relatively few surprises – with the possible exception of the increased prominence of keys at occasional moments. Harris, Pradvica and Puleo are the anchoring force, holding the album together with the same, brutal heft that they have honed to perfection on the road in recent times. The guitars alternate between beguiling waves of sound and staccato, quasi-metallic riffing. Never once does this album sound like a traditional rock record, but never does it sound completely absent either. Largely unidentifiable instrumental flourishes slip into proceedings completely naturally, as if rock bands always had a drummer (Harris) who also plays about sixteen other instruments when it takes his fancy. Then there are the occasional folk-esque diversions, appearing like more fully fleshed takes on Gira’s Swans interlude project Angels of Light.

All this is not to suggest that The Glowing Man in any way resembles a bad – or even below average – record. Some moments here are amongst the greatest in the Swans arsenal, not least the hypnotic ‘The World Looks Red / The World Looks Black’ and the astonishing reworking of ‘Frankie M.’, for the first half of its duration almost completely unrecognisable from the version of the song debuted on the band’s last tour. Few could deny the emotional power of ‘When Will I Return?’, led by the vocals of Michael’s wife Jennifer, and inspired by her own horrific experience of sexual assault. Elsewhere the signs of Swans’ true greatness are obscured only by the sense that this record lacks the consistent intensity of either the band’s live show or their previous two albums. The title track, in particular, is simply exhausting rather than being exhaustively brilliant in the manner of previous half hour epics ‘Bring the Sun’ and ‘The Seer’. Dismissing a record purely by reference to its predecessors like this may seem churlish, but it is difficult to see exactly what The Glowing Man is bringing to the table that those albums did not. Read as something of a restatement of ideals The Glowing Man is impressive, if perhaps unessential.

Of course, this album is also being released under something of a cloud. The rape accusations (relating to an incident between the two in 2008) made by former collaborator Larkin Grimm in February also served as an uncomfortable reminder that Gira has not always been the seemingly at peace demigod of the experimental world that he has become in recent years*. Lest we forget, Swans broke up in 1998 in significant turmoil. The atmosphere within the group on their final tour was notoriously tense. Anyone who has listened to the track ‘You See Through Me’ from Gira’s solo album Drainland will be under no illusions as to some of the rather unpleasant aspects of his relationship with former collaborator Jarboe. I have always believed that one of Gira’s greatest strengths as an artist has been his willingness to confront his demons on record. In this sense Swans’ post-reactivation cycle of albums has – quite fundamentally, I suspect – been informed by Gira’s own quest for emotional and spiritual redemption.

Read in this light, The Glowing Man’s existence may well be a genuine necessity after all. It is – if you like – the final part of a trilogy charting the transcendent power of sound and its hold over one undeniably extraordinary musician. There is little doubting that these three albums will go down in history as having contributed to one of the most extraordinary creative periods in the history of any band. So, even if the question of whether this album truly offers anything that The Seer or To Be Kind did not may be up for debate, but it is not debatable that Swans have earned the chance to round off this era of the band’s existence on their own terms. That those terms are completely non-negotiable and potentially alienating should really be of no surprise whatsoever.

* For the record Gira has vociferously denied these accusations and provided his own account of events. Grimm is seemingly not intending to take things any further. It do not believe it is my place as a music journalist to decide what happened based on their conflicting statements, but equally I do not believe that (as has so often been the case in similar cases over the decades) it is appropriate for music writers to simply carry on writing about the band as if these accusations were never made.

Tiny Mix Tapes 60

Swans
The Glowing Man

[Young God/Mute; 2016]

Rating: 3/5