2023-10-08 18:00:57
Michael Gira is the sixteenth studio album by the Swans approached as if it were his last. The Beggar This makes it almost liberating – more contemplative and calm, more forgiving and accessible, and even more positive all round than you would imagine Is There Really A Mind? would have thought possible.
Again: so that The Glowing Man was so decidedly proclaimed as the end of an era, only to be with Leaving Meaning. To present a work that is more or less typical, but also underwhelming in its solid nature, Gira hasn’t done anyone any favors, least of all the 2019 album itself.
First The Beggar Lover (Three)a 44 minute album within an album, is now reaping the benefits of Leaving Meaning.with Gira here as a continuation of Number One Of Three and Look At Me Go created a collage of past and future, a “combination of previously recorded elements from Swans music, new recordings made specifically for the piece, and ‘found’ non-musical sounds […] trying to forge a soundscape that is dynamic, moves forward, and has psychological friction and resonance”.
A symphonic monster that assimilates infinitely swelling guitar walls, cinematographic samples, retro-futuristic waltzing dystopias, familiar motifs and evocative volumes of this newly forced friendliness in the atmosphere full of bright choirs beyond all post-avant-gardisms into a coherent whole, so very physical experience with religious intensity is like that Swans-Music can only be captured off stage and on recordings. A black hole, a juggernaut and a trip – that’s all Leaving Meaning. dines. But also not really representative of the essence of The Beggar.
That shows that Swans so close to the Angels of Light – and Gira is perhaps so oriented towards the pop principle for long stretches! – as is probably possible for the 69 year old: “After numerous pandemic-induced cancellations of tours for the previous Swans album leaving meaning, and an apparent bottomless pit of waiting, waiting, waiting, and the strange disorientation that came with this sudden but interminable forced isolation I decided it was time to write songs for a new Swans album and forget about everything else. They came relatively easily, always informed by the suspicion that these could be my last. When I finally was able to travel, songs in hand, to Berlin to work with my friends recording this record, the feeling was akin to the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the film changes from Black and White to Color. Now I’m feeling quite optimistic. My favorite color is pink. I hope you enjoy the album.”
And yes, that’s exactly what you do: The Beggar is as inviting, entertaining and entertaining as few other Swans works, introspective and at the same time very open in the conciseness of its statements, especially since the fate of Michael Gira as a person is now finally synonymous with the fate of the band.
The relatively sparse, worn-out dark folk music has long been reduced to vocals and guitar, lamenting its melancholy either in a sacred or pagan way The Parasite takes up the thread of its predecessor relatively seamlessly in terms of mood, but as soon as Gira bathes in an ethereal synth sea full of pastoral drone elegy towards the middle, the MO changes more typically Swans-Mannerisms. In Paradise Is Mine takes a seductively gentle groove with fairytale-like, ghostly harmony vocals by the hand, even a martial edge undercut in the hypnotic stoicism surprisingly smooth, before the solemn embalming of female ladies in the background Los Angeles: City of Death shows a jubilant grandeur that brings to mind the late Nick Cave, meanwhile the hopefully tinkling, subtly hymnal Michael Is Done rather The Polyphonic Spree serve as a reference, even though Gira no longer makes any abstraction between himself and the status quo of the band, something seems to be growing like a tumor: “When Michael is gone/ Some other will come“. An interesting trick in terms of content – although not necessarily universally appealing.
In Unforminga pleasantly comforting Americana trance, he demands symptomatically and successfully “Freedom from fear!“, and the title track picks up speed with a slightly jazzy tone, moving as nonchalant post punk with mysterious ease. From the warm and soft inviting No More of This If others, like Paul Weller, had made a soulful ballad with melodically oscillating guitars and smooth ladies with stadium ambitions under an optimistic starry sky – here everything remains vague until the band merges into one Pink Floydreciting ‘esque march. The fairytale anachronism Ebbing strides in swaying Midsommar folklore, peaceful and at peace with itself, the bluesy spirit world of the patiently playful Why Can’t I Have What I Want Any Time That I Want? targeting.
An alignment that perhaps doesn’t have the mortifying intensity of the greatest Swans-masterpieces that add a fascinating, essential facet to the band’s work, as well as brightening the emotional portfolio, which, if the worst came to the worst, would actually put such a conciliatory, rounded end to Gira’s career.
That The Beggar actually missed its ideal ending because of the smooth, pounding groove of The Memorious with its psychedelic-hypnotic guitar line and the mood of optimism that goes nowhere after the wonderfully jazzy, dreamy laid to rest The Beggar Lover (Three) seems like a redundant epilogue (or at least is out of place as such in the otherwise round flow) is somewhere almost an irony of fate. Or a signal to album number 17?
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