Swans

In a season where festival line-ups are dominated by regenerated underground bands – from Throbbing Gristle to Godspeed You! Black Emperor – the news that Swans were to reappear this autumn with a new album and a string of live dates should not have been surprising. Yet, somehow, it was.

It was not just that frontman Michael Gira had dissolved the band in 1997, disillusioned and exhausted with a project whose name had become synonymous with physically brutal and emotionally cathartic music; or that the story of Swans seemed such a perfect arc, a narrative of intensity, revelation and implosion. That stuff is for writers to worry about, really; retro-fitting history onto the fluid, personal process of music-making. It was more that Michael Gira’s post-Swans output as Angels Of Light and his curatorship of the Young God record label has had such a strong character of its own, the band and the label providing a home for Gira’s pursuit of his skeletal, idiosyncratic songwriting, as well as releasing lush editions of Swans’ back catalogue. Releases such as the fierce gospel-folk of Akron Family and Devendra Banhart’s earliest, oddest records seem at first to have little in common with a band commonly described as ‘industrial’. Yet the music on Young God, including Gira’s own noir-ish blues, often echoes the almost uncomfortable emotional honesty that characterized Swans, as well as a sense of urgency both sonic and lyrical. It is truth-seeking, light-seeking music, devotional at its core. Once one stops thinking in genre – noise, No Wave, country, alt-folk – all Gira’s musical concerns seem to take (albeit diverse) paths towards this one point.

Why, then, exhume a past project, even only in name? My Father Will Guide Us Up A Rope To The Sky (Young God Records, 2010) doesn’t exactly answer the question but hints at a renewed desire to return to the places that Swans once explored, not least in the structure of its songs. Crucially, it is built like a Swans record, and this process – and the transparency or clarity of it – is why opening track ‘No Words/No Thoughts’, in which a clatter of tuned percussion gives way to sliding brass that heralds the song’s main, monochordal body, exerts the pull on the listener that it does. Its sense of piling, rising exhortation, somewhere between a gospel call-and-response and a battering ram, will feel familiar to all Swans fans.

‘Built’, here, is not just another word for ‘written’ or ‘composed’. Swans music is built in the most literal sense: the language of construction has felt appropriate right from the early ‘80s recordings in which layers and slabs of percussive, low-end sound interlock like machinery, but animated by blood, muscle, sex and anger into visceral, amorphous grooves. While the band’s sound expanded and developed into lusher and more diverse melodic territory, guided in part by vocalist Jarboe, this architectural or sculptural style of composing did not change – songs continued to consist of just one or two chords on guitar and bass and repetitive vocal and keyboard patterns, and do so right up to the most recent Angels Of Light album (whose opener, ‘Black River Song’, kicks off with a typically pounding three-note riff). Repetition and simplicity are not in themselves remarkable, of course, but Gira’s employment of these techniques has always been notable, whether burying the repetition inside a song to create an obsessive, hypnotic quality or highlighting it so that the repeated sound slices at the listener like a strobe light. His use of repeated lyrical motifs, which is less obvious unless observed over whole albums, is similarly skillful.

The same is true of much of My Father…: ‘My Birth’ and ‘Eden Prison’ both circle around a central, pendulum-like rhythmic pattern that only lets up in the latter for an interlude of atonal stabs. The presence of early Swans guitarists Norman Westberg and Christoph Hahn results in a skilfully layered scree of guitar noise that also, perhaps due to the guitarists’ experience, has an engaging looseness that a younger, newer recruit, too keen to ‘sound like Swans’, might not have managed. These heavier tracks also showcase the impressive drumming of Shearwater and Angels of Light drummer Thor Harris, whose low, martial rolls give the album much of its ominous swing.

Tracks like ‘Reeling The Liars In’, which draws the listener into its wryly vengeful campfire chorus with a friendly waltz rhythm, and closer ‘Little Mouth’, which sets a prayer-like repetition of ‘May I…’ to a loping country tune complete with ghostly whistling, bring mind the earthiness and slightly filmic qualities of Angels Of Light – a project that, broadly speaking, always seems more elementally concerned with open space, air and land, than the interior landscapes of Swans. The live feel of My Father… is also a fact of its recording: the album was put together to a tight deadline, with little time for post-production experimentation.

The most ‘constructed’ track, ‘You Fucking People Make Me Sick’, which uses vocals from Devendra Banhart and Gira’s three-year-old daughter, while relatively quiet, is perhaps the most uncompromising track on the album, and indicates not only where Gira might take his new Swans next (in the studio at least) but also alludes to some of the more unnerving tracks on Swans’ last studio album, Soundtracks For The Blind (1997), in particular ‘Hypogirl’, which starts with a strangled scream, and sets parched, paranoid vocals (‘I love you more than life… We’ll never escape’) against cold synths and acoustic guitar.

‘You Fucking People’ takes a similar tack, Banhart professing love and demanding ownership in his own witchy tones, echoed by the little girl’s voice, culminating in an tumbling outro of harsh brass tones.

Comparisons to the sprawling, lengthy Soundtracks are unfair and inaccurate – the 1997 album was painstakingly put together from a huge body of work accrued over two decades – but this reminder of it points to one element of Swans music not so present in this 2010 version: the experiments with ambient sound, tape collage and noise that crop up both on Soundtracks… and Gira’s Body Lovers/Body Haters project (1998).

This awareness of sound and its ambiguity and power has always sat well with Gira’s direct, visceral lyrics, adding a genuinely mysterious aspect to the blood, bones and teeth of his words. It is also an indirect legacy of the No Wave movement in which Swans originated, where rock music was stripped down and reconfigured using techniques from visual art, performance art, sculpture and other disciplines. The relative sparseness of My Father is bracing and, ultimately, it is as odd and moving as anything Gira has produced; it also feels like a tentative new beginning, though, and that something much larger, stranger, more contrary, could come next.