Despite the lies I often tell, I did not get into the Swans in their earliest incarnations. The journey began for me with Children of God, part of a trinity of American rock albums (the other two were Sister by Sonic Youth and Big Black's Atomiser) that weaned me from the light independent rock of my teenage years, and opened me up to a more artistic, experimental music.
A heavy double album, apparently investigating the history of Christianity but stopping off for tours around desperate sexual yearning and gardens of lost innocence, Children of God marked the transition of Michael Gira's muse from an unrepentant masculine aggression to a more textured palette. Gira's brooding voice was off-set by Jarboe's seductive, feminine whisper and the concluding track refused to condemn or celebrate a religion that was, in the late 1980s, encountering serious problems coping with modernity.
Within a few years, the pastoral tones of Jarboe's tracks would dominate on The Burning World but until then, there was a back catalogue to explore.
The earliest versions of the band - as their wikipdia entry points out, few members have remained consistently except for Gira himself - moved from being a relatively recognisable version of No Wave towards something more monumental and unique. The production values of 1980s studios limits their impact against contemporary noise units - even Slipknot can capture a similar immensity now - yet, at the time, and well into the twenty-first century, they had a reputation for being the loudest band in the world. This reputation was cemented by Gira's antics on-stage. Even by the time of Children of God, Gira was still practically fighting his audiences, and environmental health officers would express concern about their volume.
As a completist, I ended up with vinyl versions of Filth and their debut EP: neither album hints at a band who would have such a long career or find a distinctive voice. It's Cop, Young God and Raping a Slave that stand out: grinding, slow, topped by offensive lyrics that picture a New York inhabited by corrupt officials and sociopaths: sex becomes another act of violence and the self is merely yet another murderous trap. The musical preoccupations of the minimal riff at loud volume, the slow, relentless drumming, the human voice tiny and despairing in the welter of noise are mirrored by the word.
For a teenager seeking rebellion, Gira's vision of a world in thrall to demonic passions, bleached of pleasure and offering no release was transfixing. Given his later fascination with religious imagery, it is not unfair to say that the narrative contained within these three releases was the most pessimistic representation of reality since Gnosticism fell out of fashion. If indie-rock was a chronicle of the small town blues, Swans had a cosmic depression.
These themes are followed through into Holy Money and Greed. Unlike Cop, these albums has aged less gracefully. Probably because Gira was becoming more experimental, the forays into deep freezed funk or the first introduction of acoustic instruments sound dated. The drum machines, for example, sound tinny and inappropriate to the overall caustic noise. Where Cop was single-minded and exact, Holy Money applied the Swans' template across genres, crushing them all into monolithic slabs of rage.
At the time, I was utterly thrilled. In retrospect, I didn't quite understand how Gira was using soulless sex as a metaphor for political and social disgust. Nor did I recognise the problems that Swans' musical ambitions presented to a band wanting to escape the simplistic responses of an audience that shouted "louder, slower" at them.
After all, I knew where these experiments were leading - to Children of God. They were missives from a divine source, field reports on a universe I could not understand. And as I grew in education and pretension, here was a band that demanded to be taken seriously. The sound might have been visceral, but the content remained open to interpretation, discussion.
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