Swans - Mother of the World

Riff mark: 0:00

Praise be to Michael Gira, whose name slant rhymes with “my hero.” The only musician sane enough to mug madness in its maw as the world around him rots with sophomoric protocol. His lack of compromise through thirty years of determined incubation now hatches the penultimate climax of every Swans paragon, The Seer, an album with both patience and inevitability not unlike steamrollers. There are extracts: the grinding steel-mill repetitions of Filth and Children of God, the face-to-mirror self-scolding of White Light, and the scattered banging of haunted fireworks that is Soundtracks for the Blind, all of which are swallowed by the hulking prominence of The Seer and its ambitious, majestic two-hour span, seeming to forget names and meanings, operating through cores rather than itemizations (I see it all). Songs are secondary to ideas here, peculiar percussion jackhammering waypoints for strummed and slaughtered strings, vocals not of a foreign tongue, but of a foreign life, everything totaling into lumbering, freakish mammoths for tracks: three of which combine for 70 minutes. Deceptively NOT boring, but passionate and demanding, as each punctuation note in the minimalism that is the bursting middle of the title track (the only 32-minute thing I’ll ever like) is a necessary tally mark. The orchestration in each explosion is tremendous, quantities of drums accompanied by woodwinds, cellos, pipes, chimes, harmonicas, orchestras of dissonance finding singularity in existence. Utterly indescribable with words, labels, or tonality, yet ardently recommended for its unchartered prose, which Gira narrates with courage amidst age (late 50’s at time of release), frustration, and sobering recall: pained wisdom expressed by an individualist in universal concepts, older than earth, known by anything green or with pulse.