The SWANS' Epic Soundtracks
"Do not ask me who I am, and do not tell me to remain the same." The words
belong to the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, but they might equally
apply to the musical career of SWANS mastermind Michael Gira. Over the course
of the last fifteen years, Gira, backed by a revolving cast of collaborators,
has worn many musical masks, from raging post-punk nihilist to
strumming Leonard Cohen-styled existential troubadour to avant-garde
experimental neo-classicist. Yet, like the aforementioned French
philosophe, and the artistic mentor to both men, The Marquis De Sade,
Gira's thematics have nevertheless remained fairly constant: tearing away the
superficial societal veil to delve into the taboo, the abject, all the
"unspeakable," aspects of human existence, is for him is an act which holds
the tantalizing promise of enlightenment, perhaps even the reclamation of
lost innocence.
Gira has paid a price for being an original, an innovator, seeing others
commercialize certain aspects of various SWANS incarnations and make a pile
of money whilst he himself has struggled just to keep his band afloat. Listen
today to the relentless, apocalyptic sonic attack of early SWANS songs like
"Raping A Slave" and "Time Is Money (Bastard)" and you'll literally hear the
invention of the "industrial" genre which has made worthy disciples like Al
Jourgenson of Ministry and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails rich men. But
while the ability of his artistic progeny to evolve is still open to question,
Gira has relentlessly pushed forward into unknown musical terrain.
Soundtracks For The Blind, the penultimate SWANS album (their will be
a limited edition live recording from the current world tour) sees him tying
together the various elements which have fuelled different editions of the
band over the years, creating a sound that is, as always, unique.
While Tricky expertly evokes the claustrophobic feeling signified by the
phrase "pre-millennium tension," Gira and his significant (artistic and real-
life) other, Jarboe, whose haunting, ethereal vocals changed the musical
direction of the band when she joined in the mid-80s, create what might be
labelled a "post-millennium" sound. True to the implications of its title,
SFTB is an unsettling score for the time after the millenial collapse--
societal, psychic, whatever--has taken place. It is the sound of a new
mythology being born, exhibiting at times an epic, neo-religious intensity.
While Gira utilizes "found" sounds, snippets of recorded conversations,
cassette loops, and a variety of other objet trouves, the result
is far from the anxious and neurotic "problematization" of such
elements that is a typical feature of "postmodern" art. Rather, the music
here is flowing and seamless, the opening of a space where "reality" and
"fiction" blur to create a new world.
Over 26 songs and 140 minutes long, SFTB is a primordial musical
stew from which the defined shapes of songs emerge, momentarily shimmer, and
then finally return. Evocative, ambient passages such as
"Red Velvet Corridor" help set the mood for epic tracks like "Helpless Child,"
in which Gira, in an emotionally naked, fragile voice, details his
helplessness before the power of the archetypal female, and perhaps even
Mother Nature herself: "The muddy water runs, beneath your folds / You
won't let me breathe, you won't let me go . . . You'll blacken my innocence,
with sugar and opium." Here, as elsewhere, delicate, reflective,
acoustically-based musical segments are finally resolved by epic,
neo-classical flourishes whose power approximates the kind of intensity found
on early SWANS records in a new form .
Interestingly, where previously it was Gira who would rant and rave in
declamatory fashion while Jarboe provided melodic relief, these roles are now
more often switched: Gira croons his existential ballads in a deep,
narcotically soothing voice, while Jarboe provides moments of Dionysian
psychosis on songs like the live "Yum-Yab Killers," (also featured on her
solo album of last year, Sacraficial Cake) where she screams lines like
"We are the wild / We are the risk / Come little Yum-Yab / Come slash your
wrist" in an unhinged fashion over a raucous musical background. Also
interesting is the pulsating "Volcano," a thinly veiled homage to Courtney
Love in which Jarboe returns to her melodic vocal style to lyrically play
with rock and roll gender stereotypes: "You wear a dress of blood and lace
. . . Your lipstick smear across your face . . . Strap on your guitar, now
spread your legs just like a star / And I'd like to eat her breasts and know
God." The result is tantalizingly erotic.
SFTB's most intense moments, however, belong to Gira, who, for all
his previous excursions into the dark side of existence, has never sounded
quite so open and vulnerable as he does here on songs like "Animus" and
"The Sound," where his voice quivers and cracks with a mixture of
passion and emotional torment. "But I will contain all, that ever was or
will be," he sings during the former track. "Then I'll watch my skin
erupt, in a symphony of flames / Screaming out your name, screaming out your
name." No, we're definitely not in "Live Forever" musical territory here.
Gira even includes, on the medieval sounding "How They Suffer," taped
conversations with his father, who relates, in a voice of calm resignation,
the details surrounding the gradual loss of his eyesight, and with Jarboe's
physically failing mother.
The effect, however, is far from morbid, but instead compassionate.
Where once, in his youth, Gira justifiably lashed out against the
inequalities and fascistic elements which control our lives, making a virtue
out of his alienation, he has, in this final stage of SWANS, broken through
the barriers of his own ego to recognize and embrace the suffering of humanity
as a whole, to realize that the young man or woman all too quickly becomes the
old, that strong man eventually becomes sick, that we are all finally equal
in suffering and death. And in these final moments before the death of that
entity known as SWANS, Michael Gira stands revealed in his essence as a
philosopher in the oral tradition the Ancients, one whose public
journey has been as profound as any that the rock world has yet witnessed.