Swans part 3

Having spent around a decade proving that rock’n’roll was noise pollution – it is rumoured that their PA was once dismantled by health and safety officers – Swans slapped their audience in the face with an album of folk inflected beauty.

Gira has more or less disowned The Burning World and it remains their most uncharacteristic set. A cover version of Blind Faith’s Can’t Find My Way Home, the jaunty single Saved (a more positive reading of spirituality) and a cast of musicians invited by producer Bill Laswell revealed not only a band more comfortable in their skins, but Gira’s rich baritone. A solo show in Glasgow for the Counterflows Festival would prove that, shorn of noise, Gira is an accomplished singer-songwriter, capable of turning the acoustic guitar into a weapon and allowing space for lyricism and vocals that would impress Leonard Cohen: and this tool is most audible on The Burning World.

Once again, context reveals much. At the time of The Burning World, music from Africa and the Middle East was emerging in the alternative charts (Ofra Haza, who turned out to be a fairly middle-of-the-road star in her homeland, was gaining coverage for her Yemenite Songs, and WOMAD was kicking off). The Burning World caught that spirit.

Gira’s displeasure at the album – it was their only release on a major label – might have fuelled the pair of albums that followed: White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life. Keeping some of the ‘ethnic’ influences, but hooking them to a more visceral beat and less optimistic lyrics, Swans pulled on psychedelic influences to become a dazzling assault.

Live, the band seemed to  chase something elusive yet physical: the way that the band is now described is a better fit for their live performances in the early 1990s, when the rattle of noise was matched by glorious harmonies and swooping moments  of majesty. Jarboe was providing a vocal counterpoint to Gira’s intensity, and the drones (three guitars and keyboards unified) had a polyphonic depth. And lyrically, Gira was finding a compromise between the early sparseness and a poetic vocabulary that evoked the universes of love and destruction that the music suggested.

It’s difficult to understand why I lost interest after this period. I remember finding The Great Annihilator on vinyl, and thinking it was an uneasy mixture of the important period and the ecstatic period. The title sounded like a parody of Swans’ previous fascination with extremity (it is named after that big black hole that is going to devour the universe, eventually).