Swans : Birthing
The seventeenth album from Swans finds the legendary experimental rock group incorporating sounds spanning the entirety of their over-40-year career. Since Michael Gira resurrected the project in 2010 with My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, they have diverged into even more extended, free-form structures than where they left off with 1997’s Soundtracks for the Blind, and the romantic depth of Gira’s stark baritone croon gave way to wild rambling that owed more to Captain Beefheart. Birthing offers a little more of the darkness they turned from to win over jam band hipsters, but without winking to their clovesmoking fan base of the ’80s and ’90s.
Expansive and layered, much like its four preceding albums, Birthing has to be listened to with headphones to get the full experience. It opens with the 21-minute sonic sprawl of “The Healers,” and much as its title suggests, the band jams into sounds like those you might expect to hear at a Pentecostal Tent revival during the prophecy and prayer portion of their rituals. Once the groove kicks in, they conjure the feeling of their ’90s golden years, making it worth the 11 minutes it took to build to it.
The shimmering ambient buzz of “The Healers” bleeds over into “I am the Tower,” in which Gira is back into his manic, spoken-word style of vocalization that has marked their post-2010 work, with more melody emerging as the song unfolds. Their strength as a band has always been their ability to make a drone pay off, and they are one of the few bands who can deliver it like this. The beautiful sonic material they lock into makes it worthwhile, even while, as a live band, they are also incredibly loud, felt as much as they are heard.
The 22-minute title track ranges from a boiling, darker rock dissonance to ringing with the lush sonic purpose of their ’90s sound, albeit without Jarboe, which is an understandable sticking point for some fans. However, it’s hard to argue against the expansive ache of the guitar melodies that unfold here. Gira’s vocal intonation acts much like a Buddhist chant. This is before the song breaks down into a fragile lullaby, proving again their influence on the shape and sound of post-rock.
“Red Yellow” opens with a creepy whispered cadence to Gira’s vocals that feels like a surreal cultic chant from a ’60s horror movie soundtrack. The hypnotic groove of the drums falls into an almost Led Zeppelin-like throb, and it’s easily one of the best songs they have written in the past 15 years. “Guardian Spirits” mixes the experimental layers of sound from their The Seer era with their darker ’90s feel, before even dipping their toes back into the industrial clanging of their early days. Meanwhile, the heartbeat of “The Merge” is a cool noir bass line that opens the door to incorporate more jazz than anything you might previously recall hearing from them over the years.
The strength of Birthing is Swans’ ability to avoid just strolling back into the nostalgia of yesterday, but Gira and company do employ moods closer to the classic sounds of the Jarboe era. Gira has said this album is going to be the band’s last album that is done in this scope, which, at 71 years old, makes sense for him to bow out gracefully. Nonetheless, it has some of the strongest songwriting since their return, serving as the best encore fans could ask for.
Label: Young God
Year: 2025
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Swans : Birthing
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