Album Review: Birthing by Swans

A phase comes to a close with an exceptional album from an exceptional collective, led by one of the most powerful songwriters of the past 40 years Any number of adjectives could apply to Swans albums since the outfit’s reformation in 2010, and people have applied all of them – everything from ‘majestic’ to ‘punishing’, from ‘transcendent’ to ‘exhausting’. Add to these ‘titanic’, ‘monolithic’ or, better yet, ‘awesome’, in the older, more biblical sense of the word, because these records, compositions, constructions of sound, if we can still call them that, are not albums in the usual sense but cataclysmic structures, huge black peaks (to borrow from Wordsworth) of intent and obsession, rising up out of the cultural muck to cast long, obliterating shadows over the rest of so-called contemporary music, which flits and flutters and collapses in on itself while Swans build ever upward, or perhaps ever inward, depending on how you look at it, how you hear it. Most of them also clear 90 minutes, including this new one, Birthing, which hits 115 minutes.

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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.

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Birthing is the latest sonic crucifixion from Swans, Michael Gira‘s relentless sound monolith that has been bludgeoning listeners since Ronald Reagan was president. From the first convulsion of sound, Birthing, like any Swans record, isn’t so much music as a reaction against music--a disavowal of melody, pleasure, and your nervous system’s comfort threshold. If forgotten gods had nightmares, then Birthing would be the unfiltered confession, a raw transmission hammered out on time’s fractured skull by some cosmic shaman whose every strike reassembles the very voice it’s trying to speak.

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Since reforming in 2010, Swans have made a habit of testing the patience of their audience in pursuit of transcendence, often rewarding that perseverance with profound and overpowering listening experiences. Birthing, a two-hour album with an average track length of about 16-and-a-half minutes, continues that tradition but is even slower, heavier, and more ominous. If the band's previous two albums, 2019's Leaving Meaning and 2023's The Beggar, felt introspective and somewhat muted despite their sense of baroque grandeur, Birthing reaches outward, as if toward the stars, aiming for something far more cosmic.

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