Review Summary: The Seer returns
Birthing doesn’t feel like a beginning, unless it's in the sense of a transition from one world into another. It is not “back,” in the same way
The Seer was “back”; that liturgical, cosmic exhalation that forced listeners to attend as if caught in the ritual of a long-abandoned faith. If we look at birth as transition, passing through the enclosed womb into the open world, the title of Swans latest starts to make sense. But even in its place as transition,
Birthing feels more akin to a synthesis, a churning together of what’s gone before into a fertile coda in which to plant the seeds of whatever’s next.
The Seer comparison is almost inevitable, of course, because The Seer remains the sun against which every other late-career Swans album silhouettes itself. But if
The Seer was the sudden and violent rending of the veil, then
Birthing is the slow forgetting of what was seen. The visions have no object, there’s no greasy beast heaving in a field of sticky black mud. The bliss of the gentle drone-wave that opens the album, met with Gira’s desert-patriarch intonations much as they’ve ever been, would be near-formless if not for the anchoring rhythm of those two repeated guitar notes in a headnodic, drifty loop. The explosions we all know are coming as the reward for all our patience, are more staid, more gentle than we’ve been led to believe by the more grandiose works of the post-
Soundtracks era but it’s just as cosmic in its scope as anything they’ve done before now.
Rimbaud once declared, as he reached towards his total derangement, “Je est un autre”, or “I is another”. He then wrote himself into delirium and out of literature. He became a Seer, dissolved himself, and couldn’t live with the madness of it. Gira too, perhaps. But not in the same symbolizing, sense-deranged way, but in a mode of full mysticism now, all our Bardo Pond-esque cosmic droning (please check Bardo Pond) abandoning all symbol, all image with which to attach itself. Where the Symbolists hoped the arrangement of vowels and images could reveal the infinite, Gira rearranges the soul by holding it in repose for minutes at a time drawing it in little concentric loops that spread out patiently until the force of their motion tears it apart.
Birthing has this in abundance. Its drones are not static but tectonic, glacial, their upheaval no grinning, human-toothed face behind the facade of the world, but a layered taste of the dissolution of the self.
In this sense,
Birthing is a rejection of
The Beggar. That album, with all its wheezing theatricality, felt like Gira recording just to confirm he was still alive. It wasn’t bad, only unnecessary and tedious, which, for a Swans album is the big risk they gamble on with each of their late-career works, and which they’ve deftly avoided for almost their whole career. Much like
Leaving Meaning,
The Beggar asked questions we already knew the answers to, but in a way so slackened and anemic it didn’t actually leave any sense of meaning.
Birthing doesn’t ask anything. It plays a single note for what feels like centuries and layers itself again and again on top of you until like Giles Corey all you can do is ask for more. That brings up the question I’m asking as the album plays out: whether or not patience will be rewarded by me being crushed to death (happily, it will, over and over again), and whether patience and repose itself is sufficient recompense (it often, but not always, is).
Birthing’s not new, not in the conventional sense. It is not a break from the old. It is a return to something in the shape of the rent in the sky that
The Seer was illustrating, but something that feels like an invitation to pass through, rather than to see what’s staring back in that abyss. The transcendence of it, even in the quasi-glitch-core freakout at the beginning of The Merge, is a headiness to be found in the absolute best of the likes of Natural Snow Buildings. Gira does not innovate so much as he bores deeper into the same hole he’s been digging in for years. But what he extracts now, finally feels more vital, not less.
The big knock against this album, and one the detractors will invariably and justifiably bring up, is the pacing.
The Seer, for all its scope and length, felt meticulous in its construction, its audacious runtime justified again and again, and while
Birthing’s length rewards patience with repetition and familiarity, its length never feels as daring or essential as that massive career highlight. Don’t take this to mean that the meandering drones aren’t majestic and rewarding, far from it. But they don’t crush in the way
The Seer did, and the space inside them is a bit cooler, brighter in a way that feels like it’s not reaching for the viscera as it is somewhere in the space behind the eyes.
I’ll also give the detractors this, though with qualifications: The Merge is the only track that truly feels like it’s going to find its way on the top ten Swans lists that are no doubt going to be revised after this. But it’s also the only one that’s truly trying to grip the listener by the throat with that Swans violence that I was so sure had subsided completely after
Leaving Meaning. But this also doesn’t feel like an album that needs that kind of confrontation. It’s immediate and thrilling, time and time again, but in the way a fever dream is. It’s stark and disorienting, but once it’s done, it doesn’t tend to linger.
Which brings us to where we’re going to situate this in Swans’ massive catalogue. It’s not a landmark in the way
The Seer was, though that album is certainly the closest point of comparison we have, as an amorphous and massive revival album after a period of silence and uncertainty. Certainly this is a reinvigoration after the tepidity of their previous two, a fulfillment of their promise and a fitting coda to this stage in Swans’ career, as Michael has claimed it to be. I can’t put it next to
To Be Kind, or even
Children of God, but the vitality and scope of this album leave it just shy of Swans’ absolute best, still a massive bar to clear.
Spending the full two hours with this album will leave you stepping out into the world blinking like a newborn.
Birthing does not resolve so much as disperse into a shimmering lullaby afterworld. It releases you, maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it’s still playing and you haven’t noticed. Maybe you’ve changed afterward. Maybe not. It’s no new world for Swans. But it does feel like a world that’s more charged with that strange luminosity of those brightest days, when the edges of everything feel like they’re dispersing into the atmosphere. Whatever it is, it’s a beautiful thing.
