Swans – The Beggar (Young God, 2023)

At the beginning, after listening carefully a few times the last album by Michael Gira’s most famous creation, the Swans, I was skeptical about introduce it to my readers. After all I started this blog with the purpose of writing about free jazz, improvised and avant garde music, and a little bit of ethnic music, but last year I decided to broaden the reach including post punk and experimental rock, music I always listened to. Obviously Swans are included in those definitions.

But again I was sketpical because I was feeling that I was in a way not competing on equal terms with all the websites, both in english and in my own native language, Italian, devoted to explore music, old reissues and new records in order to give the readers a wider landscape. So I was asking myself why, I was insisting at writing. But in the end I have to accept that I’m alone, that all the things I can listen to with my own ears are limited and that, also, it is impossible nowadays to take the pulse of the entire music business.

So from this moment on, I’ll let casualty be part of the process. I’ll run across albums and artists because I like them or because my own radar make me feel they are important and resonate with my idea of music and art. The last album of Swans is a double album, with the second disc almost entirely occupied with one long composition. It is a mastodon. I required more than three times listening to it in order to start being conscious of what I was listening to, and not still being able to enjoy it, which is the most part of listening to music.

But the same happened with The Great Annihilator (Young God, 1995), and with Gira’s solo effort Drainland (Sub Rosa, 1995). If you type ‘Swans’ on Wikipedia you’ll find at ‘Genre’ labels like ‘experimental rock’, ‘noise rock’, ‘folk’, ‘hardcore punk’ and ‘industrial’ – think about all this influences mixed together. For their last record, intended as – another, after the cited Great Annihilator – goodbye to the music business, another style of music must be added to the recipe: drone music.

Complex as the music that resonated last year at the Auditorium Giuseppe Verdi in Milano, my own native city, music that was played so loud my ears were ringing for the two following day, replacing in my memory Keiji Haino’s as the most violent music act I attended to, the songs included in The Beggar have death and the fear of disappearing from the memory of the beloved – which is real death to those who don’t have faith, as me as an example – as the fil rouge of the lyrics.

The music is mostly dense, intense but not monochromatic pulsation, with Gira officiating the ritual of his own disappearance with all the included possible fears. Gira tries to avoid whining thanks to a functional cynicism – “When Michael is done/Then other will come” – and at the same time lap steel guitars give life to a less expected sound than the one eventually created by electric instruments, while echoes of krautrock are intended to support both Gira and co. experimental vein and the harrowing atmosphere they give life to.

The album opens with The Parasite and its guitars which, like what I heard live, are the perfect introduction to this long journey. The instruments seem to match at the beginning and look for each other in what is a painful and, rightly, annoyed melody. “You are not free / Come to me / You are not free / You must come yet to me” Gira sings, then recites “Come to me / Feed on me”.

And while the singer asks himself questions, the music becomes a drone full of anxiety and wonder: “I wonder what's inside of you”, etc. Paradise is mine is the slow, drunken ascent towards psychosis: “Now we lay in the mud […] and we wait […] for the light” until the question, punctuated by decisive drum hits, and restless wind instruments “ Is there really a mind?”, while the shorter Los Angeles, City of Death closes with those oblique and dissonant keyboards à la Ray Manzarek at the end which suggest, rather than an expansion of consciousness, its definitive closure.

But let's continue the journey with the dense guitar textures and the explosion of what seem like small bells and pseudo anthemic choirs of Michael is Done, a worthy introduction to the following disorientation of Unforming where an ecstatic country ballad worthy of Bonnie Prince Billy contrasts dark lyrics, a duality that is found throughout almost the entire album.

The Beggar is one of the many moments of meditation, rumination and assimilation, once one would have said of self-awareness, but full of questions like "When do I finally get to live?", while the rhythm becomes more martial and inexorable towards the fall. It is up to No More of This to lead us into the longed-for but probably only imagined garden of stoicism, far from pains as well as joys which will only make us more aware of those pains, in their alternation.

And if the notes become sparse, as if to allow us to glimpse a longed-for peace, Ebbing takes us to the reality made up of "sulfur tides" and "drunken tides", almost as if we were rowing towards it with a chorus of encouragement on a bed of acoustic guitars and sparse splashes of drums, all moving towards an ecstatic crescendo of sick desire with Why Can't I Have What I Want Every Time That I Want?, a slow drip driven by percussion and the harmonic ride of the guitars .

It is up to the long marathon of over 40 minutes of The Beggar Lover to open the second disc, with its long notes that bend sinisterly as in certain stochastic agglomerations of Xenakis in the introduction, to give way to the reciting voice of Jennifer Gira. We read in the liner notes that the track has been fleshed out with field recordings and reconfigured fragments from The Beggar, The Glowing Man and Leaving/Meaning.

We trust, but we can only remain admired for the intense work of arranging this material which takes us by the throat and doesn't leave us until the end, when the final The Memorious, which seems to have come out of a Nick Cave album from the Eighties, but with that emotionless yet fully expressive acting that is pure Gira.

We know that Swans will release new material soon, even if this The Beggar was supposed to be their last work. This is not the first time we have been deceived, and perhaps it will not be the last. But what could Gira do if not continue playing his music made of throbbing contrasts, and what could we do if not continue listening to him? Up until next time, beggars – we’re all as such.