Swans are dead, again – at least in what could be their most renowned iteration. The multi-generational, legendary group that Michael Gira has led for over four decades as always prone to transformation, both in their member configuration and aesthetic expression. But the chapter Gira himself has deemed their “big sound era”, starting soon after their comeback in 2010 and finding their footing on 2012’s The Seer seems irreversibly closed. Gira himself has attributed this to the spiritual and physical limits introduced by the roughly 15 years of enveloping the project in deafening sound. That, and Gira is now 71, by all accounts has an infant son and a teenage daughter and, likely, deserves a breather from the ceaseless touring and recording schedule of that dominated his life and was only cut short by the lockdown and a painful accident thereafter.
So this is it: one last tour to send off this iteration of Swans, and then – something gentler and calmer, assumedly. For the occasion of the group’s swan song, Gira has chosen Berlin for a two-night farewell. The city is not only home to lap-steel guitar player Kristof Hahn, but also where most of the group’s recent output was recorded – and where the band found a massive, cross-generational fanbase. So it makes sense to finish things here, in the intimate, leisure Festsaal Kreuzberg (or its second iteration, after the original, legendary ballroom burned down many years ago). I was lucky to witness the first of the two nights.
Having seen Gira perform a few times solo and with Swans at the end of the Glowing Man tour, I am well aware that their reputation of being the loudest thing in live music is well earned and – given my own limitations thanks to constant front row placement – am seeking an overlook position right at the very top in the back – in a place so small all the more pleasant.
As the group took the stage, Gira quickly thanked the audience, and revealed his one request to the crowd: to not film the stage. As the group started to slowly sink into droning ambience, I took a deep breath and let the music carry me…
What followed were over two and a half hours of music, in total just five songs with an intensity and euphoric density that eclipsed that of the previous Gira-led shows I witnessed! In emotional intensity, the concert was often closer to a tribal ritual than musical expression usually allows. Had you been there, you would have likely watched me wildly dance and shake about – to me, it seemed impossible to take the music without such wild movements (a large number of audience members on the back platforms seemed to agree). I had seen Swans before, this time was different. There was no sudden break in the music to allow Gira to berate audience members, no annoying drunks, just pure concentration on and off stage.
“The End of Forgetting” opened the concert with a slow, steady drone that built itself up into a slow groove of sleigh-bell infused Americana, over which Gira’s voice towered like a Western character. Then, introducing a snare-led marching rhythm that continued to become faster and faster, the section finally climaxed in a maelstrom of guitar noise and ceaseless, crushing staccato drumming, which pulsed in itself. Drummer Phil Puleo immediately introduced himself as invaluable with this track, his drumming of an unimaginable precision and dynamic.
The onslaught continued for about five minutes, at some point so intense it seemed impossible to take, but constantly pushed the audience further into its spiralling madness, before it suddenly broke down, allowing Gira to sing a solemn folk section, to lead to the main movement of the song, where the band joined him. Gira over and over repeated: “Begin again, begin again…”, finally sinking into an Ennio Morricone-type composition. A beautiful, immense beast, “The End of Forgetting” is one of two new compositions Gira brought to the tour – hard to imagine it could possibly be contained in a studio. After roughly 35 minutes, the journey ended in a euphoric climactic expression of power, and moved to the only track off Birthing the band picked: “The Merge”.
Cutting the introductory noise collage, the band immediately dived into the crushing rhythm part of Puleo and twin bass-parts of Chris Pravdica and Dana Schechter. Their riff is nothing short of evil, with a tone that is outright diabolical. While both sunk into the groove, Gira got up from his usual sitting position to conduct Puleo and percussionist Larry Mullins with his arms.
Quickly, the frontman caught an audience member filming, and – without the band breaking off – ordered him inaudibly to put it away, sliding his finger across his throat.
As intensity built, Gira transformed into a shaman, swinging his arms about, ordering Hahn to enter with the lap steel, then signaling to formative guitarist Norman Westberg to enter with his crushing, swirling, industrial guitar tone. “The Merge” interrupted into the blind joy of repetition, as the audience went along, dancing wildly, as Gira stared into the upper lights, shaking. For a long time, I lost myself in the dance, as the guitar tones started swirling and jabbing over the incessant, complex rhythm – when I next looked at the stage, Gira had picked up his acoustic guitar, swinging it like a weapon over the heads of the front rows, pointing and seemingly swearing at the dancers over the almost unbearably intense noise: a mad, wild god! And of the two and a half hours, we just crossed the 45 minute mark!
The jazzy, second section that followed dived into the territory of early Pink Floyd, ca. “Set the Controls to the Heart of the Sun”, with Mullins providing synthesiser layers to the charismatic drumming, while Westberg, Hahn and Schechter’s additional lap steel indulged in psychedelia. If anything, the track proved the immense value of Gira as storyteller, as the band crafted a basis for his teutonic vocals. The closing section moved even closer to the late 60s, returning the dual bass as central focus and adding occasional echo to the drums, allowing once more for the same deep, mystical feeling of early Floyd shows. All the while, Gira hunkered down, gesticulating forward, as if controlling the tides of a massive ocean. When, after the spoken word section, Hahn and Westberg finally joined in, the proximity to Velvet Underground seemed impossible to miss.
Seventy minutes into the show, The Beggar track “Paradise is Mine” felt almost short at about 12 minutes in length. If there was such a thing as a “breather” moment at this concert: this was likely it. Harbouring the gloomy, ghost-town atmosphere of an early Godspeed track, the song allowed the band a classic post-rock dynamic of slow build-up to a heavy finish. It was a brief moment of relaxation, as the song could be followed from point A to B with no further complexities or complications, and after finishing, Gira allowed himself a brief yodel to the audience.
When the rhythm section jumped into “A Little God in My Hands” right after, the audience broke loose: the lead single off To Be Kind is as close to a hit single this iteration of Swans ever had. Their rendition on this night was spectacular, perversely precise, with Puelo enjoying the freedom the composition allows to add tiny, subtle nuances in his drumming. Waiting as the track neared his cataclysmic noise part, Westberg towered over the group on the side of the stage, barely moving. Then, he unleashed a blindingly loud explosion, aided by Hahn and Schechter, evaporating the entire room, as Gira smiled, counting down to suddenly mitigate the fire.
During the final noise onslaught, Gira got off his chair, acoustic guitar in his arm, scanning the audience one by one. “A Little God in My Hands” is a fantastic track, and it’s hard to argue it ever sounded better live than tonight – or, at least, on this tour. By its end, the band had one song left – and, somehow, they managed to eclipse the unbridled intensity with the final 50 minutes to come.
It’s hard to describe this new track, deemed “Newly Sentient Being”, fully – the song created a world and dynamic all of its own, at times feeling more like a conceptual narrative work, a short story or film. Here, the band fully immersed themselves into a multitude of atmospheric and sonic effects right off the gate, once more returning to what is likely Gira’s formative influences of psychedelic 60s rock music. The crushing buildup that followed had Gira drive Puelo to full free jazz territory, as his drumming was as precise as it was seemingly unstable, skidding purposefully and finding sudden flaws in the structure, just to close them again.
Once this part was finished, the band broke into a haunting, electronic backdrop, embodying cosmic or oceanic depths. From there, Gira started a wave-like movement with his body, which had the band ebb and rise, again and again, over and over, until he turned and extended this movement to the audience.
As Gira returned to the role of storyteller – reflecting on the cosmos creation itself – the band added strange, incidental wooden sounds and hovering guitar notes. Pink Floyd’s never-studio recorded live-show “The Massed Gadgets of Anaximenes” came to mind, where the group explored the human routine in contrast to spiritual powers and the elemental nature of the cosmos. Then, the guitars and drums cut in, almost reminding of certain gothic post-punk bands like Fields of the Nephilim or Bauhaus.
All the while the band continued the swirling backdrop, before diverting into a sharp punk section, somewhere between Pink Floyd and Public Image Ltd. It is inescapably brilliant, like a perfection of what Syd Barrett was thriving for with “Astronomy Domine”, or a more brutalist “The National Anthem” off Kid A. Becoming louder and louder, this section is like nothing in Swans’ canon so far and – while being in its presence – truly feels as if the band has found a moment where their entire body of work folds in on itself. When it finally ended, with Puelo and Mullens drumming a marching rhythm on their snares, the song seemed to have reached its conclusion – but Gira drove it on still, shifting the track into solemn, cosmic Americana. Aided by swirling guitar tones and Pravda’s expressive bass, the song almost drifted into full-on ambient, expressing a forlorn, longing sadness. As Gira returned to vocals, the image of great plains and blood-soaked sand seemed inevitable. “There is light”, he sand, then lifted a harmonica and started playing.
It was a moment of immense grace. At this point, it seemed as if time itself only existed to mark the inevitability of this concert ending, yet Gira continued, started whistling the lead melody, a lone man in the shadow of eternity.
It is in these final moments of the song that it became inevitable to argue that this final tour might be Swans’ best yet, as Gira lifted himself and, almost drunkenly, mouthed quietly along to the track, “Bah bah bah… thereeeeeeeeeee…” At 71, he seemed all the more conscious of his age for a second, and then, suddenly, the track drifted into echoing dub. Quietly, strangely, Swans ended the show. In one final ironic twist, Gira asked for the lights to be turned on – and immediately regretted it: “Argh… not on me, the audience”, he grumbled, as he tried to shield himself from the brightness. A man that, for all his career, has asked for this moment of discomfort and shock, to strangle and bludgeon the rooms he inhabits during his shows to – at the finale – be blinded into submission by the stage lights, is almost poetic. As the crowd erupted, Gira gave it one deep, long bow, waving goodbye.
This might not be the end of Swans – in fact, Gira has already confirmed that, after a year-long break, the band will return, albeit in a new, “stripped down” form, which needs to still determine itself. But it is a farewell to this entity of unbelievable, violent grace. And honestly, judging from this show, it might be a goodbye at their very best – the closest many in the room will ever come to an experience of seeing early Velvet Underground or Pink Floyd or Miles Davis: pure elysium! Uncaringly, the night rolled in, as Swans exited the stage.
