Can you just retire as a rock musician? And how do you decide when the time is right? For 71-year-old Michael Gira, mastermind of the Swans, that moment seems to have arrived with his 17th album, Birthing. After more than 40 active years and various incarnations of his band, he presents a nearly two-hour monumental work that completes his vision as a songwriter and producer in a worthy manner. The seven monolithic tracks, most of which clock in at around 20 minutes, range from self-doubt to megalomania, from minimalist melody to bombastic noise. Songs like the single »I Am a Tower« are given plenty of space to build up a depressingly heavy atmosphere and slowly build up to an eruptive catharsis.
This can start with gentle choral singing or – as in »The Merge« – with uncompromising bludgeoning after the sweet child’s exclamation »I love you, mommy«. Vocally, Gira plays the impresario somewhere between Nick Cave without the fear of God and Lou Reed minus down-to-earthness and ironic distance. You shouldn’t expect lightness or even humor here: Birthing is characterized by a heavy, if occasionally playful, seriousness. And Gira is too much the eternal man of sorrows to be too mellow in his old age – Birthing does not mark a fading away, but rather a final, determined ascent.
Birthing
