My Life with Swans (2)

The arrival of Children of God was the culmination of Gira's experimentation with different genres. But whereas his earlier albums had applied the logic of Cop across different musical forms (A Screw was a version of dance music), Children of God explored orchestration to integrate the influences. Jarboe's voice was variously seductive or a backing choir to Gira's increasingly confident baritone. Before disappearing into the ambiguous sunset with the title track, Gira wrestled with desire, salvation and despair - the penultimate track, Blind Love would be later worked into an extended, ballistic bolero, an agonised dissection of a man struggling not to be dissolved by passion.

When it turned up in Watford, it changed my life. Not only was the music ambitious - it was satisfyingly aggressive and harsh, but demonstrated a sophisticated use of dynamics and mood - the lyrics demanded serious discussion. New Mind might have had the character of an exceptionally zealous puritan ("the sex in your soul will damn you to hell") but the ambiguity of tone, caused by the sparse, tense language opened it up to further consideration. The alternation of nice (yet sinister) and vicious (yet earnest) throughout the four sides pushed Swans beyond the generic post-punk album, which tended to rattle through at a great pace, pause for an emotional number, then hit the same urgent stride to finish.

Swans were slow, but never descended into sludge. The beat was measured, the force and confidence of Gira's music impressive and complete.

The earliest Swans' albums, I had found out in retrospect, were unashamedly masculine. Gira might have been frustrated at the band's reputation and behaviour of some fans, but a series of albums that obsessed around violence tends to lead to consequences. On Children of God, Gira widens his interests. It's easy to claim that Jarboe's presence had given them a more feminine side, but Gira was simply using whatever techniques he could find. As the nuance of Trust Me transforms his earlier dominant personae from sociopath to preacher, Children of God's range of influences evolves Swans into a more complete entity.

Perhaps most importantly, for all the sermons contained therein, Children of God did not preach a message. Earlier post-punk attempts to discuss religion (thanks, Crass, for really loving up to your name) were predictable polemics. Gira's genius was to simply reflect the manner of American evangelists, resetting their words against musical tornados. There's no attempt to catalogue Christianity's failings, or assess theological truth claims.

Children of God is an album about the way religious language is used.