Swans
What Is This?

The man with the cowboy hat has struck again, and the amazement is encapsulated in the title. From the avant-rock mysticisms of "The Seer," through the cyclical and claustrophobic litanies of "To Be Kind," to the folk-apocalyptic ballads of "The Glowing Man," the Swans have drawn a scorching, corrosive line in the second decade of the new millennium, sidereally distant from the incendiary echoes of their beginnings but with the same verve and originality that distinguishes them. Today, we can put away the earplugs and don't hesitate to crank up the volume slider, Gira has wanted to amaze us once more (as always) with an acoustic work. Violins, flutes, and trumpets stored in their cases and a cloth over the drums. The spotlight is populated only by his guitar, his voice (except "The Nub" performed by his wife Jennifer), his words, and nothing else; stripped to the bone by his own admission. Gira's leaden Springsteen-esque "Nebraska" unfolds in ten mesmerizing and hallucinatory tracks with a dystopian flavor, stripped of unnecessary embellishments and delivered in an embryonic form from genesis to listener without any intervention. In the unprecedented role of songwriter, he bares all his discomfort, the anxieties, and the world's unrest.

"All things beautiful soon pass away, like the waters," articulated Yeats in one of his poems, and "What Is This?" is a sound sequence that flows unstoppable through the twilight tales of the genius from New York. Ballard's "neuron iconography on the spinal highways" finds interesting parallels with Gira's "Amnesia" "and this city is a crowded room and the earth is a closed grave." Urban frenzy filters individual events, flattening them and reducing them to mere appearances on the stage of life where our dark protagonist is a conscious guardian. Space and time become Cartesian projections overlapped on the same axis "Somewhere no place, let's go! Nowhere this place, let's go!" in the opening "Leaving Meaning," which loses all sense of recognition and gropes forward, guided by Gira's cold voice that pierces the darkness. There is no time or space for second thoughts, even on the cough in "Hanging Man" (I don't believe it was intentional) that gives the record an even more human dimension through its imperfections. The scenarios expand in the slow litany of "The Nub," a drift in the murky waters that swallow Jennifer Gira in her subdued and resigned singing, and in the subsequent "Cathedrals Of Heaven." The pastoral "Sunfucker" and "What Is This?" offer a momentary truce, but threatening clouds gather in the suite "My Phantom Limb," where the singing often devolves into a spoken word reminiscent of Morrison, period "An American Prayer." The circle is closed by the tormented loves of "Annaline" and the closing "It's Coming And It's Real," an ideal afternoon at 2400 Fulton Street, San Francisco in the Jefferson commune (evocations of "Triad").

Gira, a genius and controversial character like few, has produced yet another monstre by bypassing economic compromises and the artistic choices of majors with a crowdfunding effort. Ethics cannot be bought, nor can talent, especially if your name is Michael and you have a cowboy hat.