According to the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, change is the only constant in life. Everything that comes into being is a product of conflicting opposites and that process of becoming never ends. We never stop becoming. We are never at rest. The music of Swans (and by extension that of songwriter/bandleader Michael Gira) is the embodiment of an ever-changing being, existing through the continual tension of opposing forces; never at rest. 

If everything is constantly changing with no fixed identity, where are the limits? Where are the boundaries? This existential questioning is a recurring theme in Gira’s writing. It’s in the title of the Swans documentary Where Does a Body End? and it runs through the forthcoming Swans album The Beggar (released via Young God Records and Mute), on which Gira is joined by current Swans Kristof Hahn, Larry Mullins, Dana Schechter, Christopher Pravdica, Phil Puleo and (guest Swan) Ben Frost (plus a number of other guest players).

Opening the CD and streaming version (the vinyl track listing is totally different) “The Parasite” immediately displays both dichotomies and opposing forces as well as Gira’s existential questioning. It’s in his words, “The more that you consume, the less you’ll ever know…”, and the music itself. Waves of sparse vocals and guitar ebb and flow, before a mid-track expansion of choral and instrumental layers has the track hypnotically transformed as the rest of the band fills out the sonic space.  

Swans have been employing these kinds of sharp transitions as far back as their late 80s material in ever-evolving musical styles. Through all these becomings, one commonality in Swans’ music has an absence of resolution. The Beggar is aesthetically quite distinct from early Swans albums like Cop or Filth. Over the years Gira has brought in more subtle instrumental approaches and instrumentation, while still keeping Swans able to overpower the listener with sonic intensity. In any era though Gira is not one for building to a payoff. The music flows and evolves. There are swells, peaks, and climaxes, but at the end remains the grind, the tension, the unresolved questions. 

2019’s leaving meaning was a significant recalibration, after the continuity of the band’s post-2010-reform material. It felt like Gira was once again searching for a new approach (though there was a nod to the past with its reworking of “Amnesia” from 1992’s Love of Life record). The Beggar goes further, in some ways evolving the delicate instrumental subtleties of the last record, while peppering the music with allusions to previous work. On the title track, as its brooding stalking rhythm evokes early 90s song “Was He Ever Alive”, Gira sings “Without your eyes upon my weakness, will I forget where I begin?”. It’s as though while casting his mind’s eye over the landscape of his and Swans’ remembered existence little fragments of the past attach to the Swans of the present. 

Gira’s existential musings here repeatedly have him pondering his own mortality. “Am I ready to die? Is there really a mind?” he wonders on “Paradise is Mine”, while the rest of the band creep along like a nocturnal predator. On “Michael is Done” he softly intones ““When Michael is gone, some other will come. When the other has come, then Michael is done”, calmly staring into the mouth of the great annihilator, as the band coalesce into a triumphant explosion of bells and angels. 

There’s tenderness and beauty in the meditative and shimmering “Unforming” and the Americana-tinged “No More of This”, though when Gira sings “No tomorrow, no open way: now is the time to finally walk away,” the tone is typically ambiguous. There’s less of a sense of pressing sadness, as there was alongside the sonic fireworks of early 90s Swans albums, but this is still Michael Gira and for all the album’s delicate beauty, tension is ever-present. At the end of the road is always the lurking void. 

Coming after these meditations, “The Beggar Lover (Three)” is one of Gira’s most ambitious and impressive musical explorations. A gigantic, mutating musical construction of almost forty-five minutes (a downloadable addition for the album’s vinyl version), the piece includes found sounds previously used on Swans’ Soundtracks for the Blind album among its twisting, shapeshifting explorations of psychological friction in musical form. It’s the one vast musical piece on the album and an impressive construction. 

Michael Gira has been pondering his existence on Swans records for decades, but The Beggar feels like the band’s most existential statement to date. Was it the heightened uncertainty of the Covid pandemic that made Gira hyper-aware of his own mortality, or is it just the inevitability of advancing years? Whatever the cause, Swans in 2023 remains vital, a musical force rushing forward headfirst into the arms of eternity. As Gira sings on “Los Angeles: City of Death” – “Just waiting to become. Here he comes, here he comes.” 

Buy the album here:

https://younggodrecords.com/products/the-beggar 

9 / 10 

TOM OSMAN