Swans
My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

Orphans of the darkness, willing lovers of the abyss, I address you.
The swans have returned.
They have returned from the desolate plains of the dream, shaking off rivers of oil and mud from their dusty wings.
The Lady is no more. Lilith, the goddess, is no more. Jane Jarboe is no more.

It wasn't death that separated the swans, but a more prosaic divorce, the end of a sentimental and creative relationship that dragged the band into oblivion for more than ten years. Good future, Jarboe. I can't say your absence isn't heavy, it would be an undeserved mockery. But I can say that, despite or thanks to this immense, emotional, and artistic void, Swans are soaring high.

Michael Gira is still there to guide them, conducting them like a grim ferryman along rivers of rust and tar.
I see him standing at the bow, a Captain Ahab seeking the white shadow that will kill him.
He resembles a Jim Morrison in hell, a Leonard Cohen thrown headlong into the screaming metal of a monstrous car crash.
His voice, only slightly aged, carves out deformed blues ("Reeling the liars in") and sometimes rediscovers the lead and obsidian tones of the past, when with the side-project Skin, he brought rock and roll into the abyss.

As the tracks play, I lose myself in a floating trance, and the mind slips, is populated by a procession of restless ghosts.
I think of Elvis, fat and sick, the clothes decorated with sequins rotting with him in the grave of Graceland. Of Michael Jackson's perforated white glove, corroded by fly larvae.
I think of Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper plummeting into a wheat field, burning in one fell swoop the innocence of the American dream.
I think of the gentle ghost of Nico, of Coil, by now funereal companions of oblivion, of the dancing specter of the mad diamond.
I think of all this, as the wave overwhelms and infects, erases and consoles.

It begins with festive tubular bells swept away by burning clangors, and everything returns to the soundtrack for the blind, to the live "Swans are dead," to that sad 1998 when the swans decided to die.
"Nowords/No thoughts" is a sphere bristling with nails, it sweeps away doubts, nine minutes of magnificent obsession, the desperate desire for a chord change that never comes, the tension that accumulates without ever offering peace. I swirl, lost in space, eyes lost in the star-adorned cover.

These are Swans at their best, there's no doubt... I am only surprised by a vague feeling of sly serenity, of wanting to please, that I had never felt before. A subtle difference between living and telling, which is the only, tiny limit of the album.
The sensation that Gira has learned, by surpassing it, the lesson of the last Nick Cave on how to become a storyteller of nightmares without sinking into them up to the neck.

But it is a mere trifle, compared to the absolute furious flashes illuminating the devastated scenarios of "My Birth" and "Inside Madeleine," compared to the apparent calm of "Jim," reminiscent of the dreamlike Angels of Light, compared to the cursed childhood game that Michael and Devendra play together in "You fucking people make me sick," the emotional climax of the album, until it explodes in angry splinters.

"My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky" is a work that sinks into thoughts, creating circles of shadow.
Diving in will be a source and joy for the cubs of the Apocalypse, for the disappointed heirs of Death in June, now lost in a solipsistic delirium.
Let it plunge to the depths of the soul, the echo of its fall will resonate for a long time.

Perhaps forever.