This year marks the 25th anniversary of Disburden Disciple (The Circle Music)—the first truly “post-Swans” solo record from the ever-magikal (and prolific!) singer, musician and songwriter Jarboe (remastered and available on vinyl for the first time). 

The solo career of Jarboe is a rich and endlessly fascinating one, with many notable releases over the past three decades. An artist in the truest sense of the word, Jarboe continues to explore new sonic terrain with apparent fearlessness, building up an impressive musical catalogue under her name. 

 

Nevertheless the years Jarboe spent in Swans have clearly cast a long shadow (both in terms of the music people associate her with and the impact her time in the band had on her). 

 

Albums like Holy Money, Children of God and White Light From The Mouth of Infinity are arguably some of the most powerful albums the band has ever made and while Swans has always been in essence the vision of Michael Gira, the importance and impact of Jarboe to the band should never be underestimated. 

 

But anyone who knows any of the story of Swans in the eighties and nineties (Jarboe having been a constant from the mid-80s till Gira first dissolved the band in 1997) will recognise that for all the creative triumphs, life in Swans was often a gruelling and both physically and emotionally brutalising experience. 

 

Jarboe’s harrowing 1998 record Anhedoniac (the title referring to the condition of being unable to experience joy or pleasure) saw her document her time in Swans and the emotional impact it had on her. 

 

Released two years later, Disburden Disciple sees Jarboe achieving a kind of triumph over the bleak landscape of its predecessor (as she seemingly embraces her capacity to experience and give pleasure), alongside an apparent recognition that her past cannot be truly outrun and that all pleasure comes bound with pain. 

Featuring some of her most sensual performances—and beguiling instrumentation that includes cello, harp and various percussion — the album almost in a way Trojan-horses its darkness into the room via its initial air of cool seduction. 

 

Opening with the funky minimalism of “Bound” (a track ultimately exploding into a kind of 70s-Rock ecstasy), there are plenty of jarring and disturbing checkpoints Jarboe subsequently leads the listener onto over the course of the record (both socially and emotionally).

 

Death is never too far away on Disburden Disciple—whether it’s the foreboding, piano-driven document of a loved one’s demise on “Under”, or the mournful, melancholic “Forgive”—and Jarboe’s vocal performances (such as the strangled, whispers that play out on “Dear 666”) are at times as disturbing as the subject matter. 

 

Even at its most sexual (on the dark eroticism of the bass-driven “Scorpion”) there remains a sense of peril and pain to the record. In fact it is here that Jarboe gives one of the album’s most telling lines when she intones in a hushed croon, “The price for intimacy and vulnerability is the ability to inflict and receive pain.”

 

Further themes of destruction, damage, and rebirth are explored through the course of the record, with Jarboe showcasing her technical and emotional versatility as a singer. 

 

Ultimately, Disburden Disciple is a record that celebrates sensuality, sexuality, and emerging from metaphorical death into some kind of light, all the while recognising the inescapable pain and suffering that follows like a shadow. 

 

Buy the album here:
https://bit.ly/3GyvkDP

9 / 10
TOM OSMAN
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