Now that it’s been out a few weeks, and the band are in the UK touring The Beggar, I feel I have finally had time to digest and reflect on the album. One thing with Swans releases in their post-millennial iteration (I use the term as a catch-all, while being keenly aware of the fact that, just as the 1982-1996 career span featured numerous phases, so 2010-present is marked by continual progression and evolution) is that they are epic works in every sense. They’re not albums where any songs leap out as ‘singles’ or that grab you as favourites. These works are designed as albums, to be experienced as such, butt this demands a commitment of time, in the region of a solid couple of hours.
Ahead of its release, Michael Gira suggested that its predecessor, ‘Leaving Meaning’ marked the end of that particular iteration of Swans, and that the lineup had reached its natural conclusion. That wasn’t to say that none of those who had contributed would not feature on future releases, but that the next phase would be more fluid. And so it is that Kristof Hahn, Larry Mullins, and Phil Puelo are present and credited as members of Swans, but Thor Harris is departed and Norman Westberg – a mainstay from as far back as 1982 – only contributes to one track.
As always, ‘The Beggar’ finds Gira pushing himself in different directions. He does still fall back to his distinctive compositional approach of structuring songs around repetitions of three or four simple – if sometimes mangled – chords for the duration of a song. Of course he does. But the band push further into exploratory spaces and more abstract structures, and while the forty-five minute behemoth ‘The Beggar Lover’ – more of which shortly – does present some dense crescendos and difficult noise, overall, ‘The Beggar’ is less abrasive and less prone to big noise than its predecessors, favouring more of an almost ‘folksy’ style – although still nothing like ‘The Burning World’ or the more acoustic-leaning songs on ‘White Light’ and ‘Love of Life’. No, this is a different beast again, and Gira, who has forged a career from mining emotional depths and not so much staring into the abyss and leaping in headlong and sending reports back from the bottom, sounds almost spent, notably on ‘No More of This’ and ‘Michael is Done’, which has not only a transcendental feel to the surging mid-section, but depicts ‘Michael’ growing wings from his back and departing.. ‘Ebbing,’ too, carries connotations of a weakening, a lessening, a process of diminishment, while the introspective ‘Unforming’ also suggests disintegration, coming apart. How literally do we take these declarations?
Lead single ‘Paradise is Mine’ is only partly representative of a more minimal album, showcasing the claustrophobic cyclical motifs that characterise many of Gira’s compositions, where the intensity derives not from hard volume, but from hypnotic repetition spinning over the duration of nine and a half minutes while Gira ponders ‘Is there really a mind? Am I ready to die?’ These are common themes within the Swans oeuvre, but somehow, this feels different. ‘The Parasite’ is a dark and lugubrious minimal chamber piece where Gira’s cavernous croon repeats the refrain ‘feed on me, feed on me, feed on me now.’ At times a ragged rasp, he sounds as if he’s being slowly hollowed out before being transported above the physical realm.
‘Los Angeles: City of Death’ is a proper stomper, it’s got a relentless hook and at three and a half minutes, it’s in that small set of songs in their catalogue that could almost be considered pop songs. It’s all relative, of course. It’s not until they arrive at the ten-minute title track that they really hit the volume, kicking in with a tsunami of sound, the drums kicking right in the chest, driving a nagging guitar line.
The track listing on the vinyl and digital formats differs, and while this is due to the limitations of format, thee fact remains that the sequencing radically alters the experience depending on your format – not least of all because while on the CD, ‘The Beggar (Three)’, a 45-minute colossus of a composition , occupies the bulk of the second disc and separates ‘Why Can’t I Have What I Want Any Time That I Want?’ and ‘The Memorious’, on the vinyl it's annexed to a separate download, and in many respects it does feel – and could, one feels, could have served as – a standalone album. With extended drones and swirls of dark ambience, punctuated by the occasional sustained tidal-wave crescendo, it has a different mood and atmosphere from the majority of the rest of ‘The Beggar’.
‘Soft’, tranquil’, ‘contemplative’, and ‘at peace’ are not words or phrases one associates with Swans, but they very much do summarise ‘The Beggar’. ‘Restrained’ is another, and this comes from a strong sense of focus which permeates the songs. It’s not a complete departure, by any means, but it does feel as if the anger that defined their early sound and continued to bubble throughout their career has finally melted away, and in its place, light pours in.
