Swans
White Light From the Mouth of Infinity

THE REVIEW

"She holds the keys to the room over there. And I, I will follow her, but I will not enter there. Yeah, we will suffer for nothing, and we will never forgive. God never told anyone to act like this. A second in your presence is a miracle of love. A rejected second a miracle of love. The young man is insecurity in the disgust of a lover. The woman is strong in her accommodating bed of lies. How can they embrace what they cannot perceive? And how can they love what they have failed to ensnare? A second among your memories is a miracle of lies. A beat of your heart is a miracle of love. White lights in a dark sky a miracle of love. A single moment in your arms a miracle of love.."

So recites Michael Gira, and immediately after there is jubilation, exultation, and palpitation. A triumphant chorus of magmatic noise, combined with dynamics of a power and intensity perhaps still unmatched even now in the new century of experimentation, interwoven with preciousness forcibly taken from the past and bent to the most disparate needs.

The Swans are the typical example of how a certain sense of the sublime truly makes a difference. "Swans were the shit", as I read somewhere in the annals of underground music... This group truly deserved the golden palm of the Olympus of the Truest Music: the level of complacency in their inevitable self-pity that reaches unexpected peaks of inner desolation, the music is frenzied sacrality, sudden like the cry of an infant in swaddling, the majesty of the themes addressed (love, power, the passage of time, failure, death) is loaded, as the record progresses, with implications now disturbing, now irreverent, indecipherable and then obvious.

Their music, if it must be so, will speak to your heart, it will pierce you with the verb of voidness and fatality... Enchanting and caustic, powerful and delicate as it may be, this is a masterpiece for refined palates, not for everyone: in fact, you risk being zombified forever, given Michael Gira's voice timbre, or falling prey to much more sacrilegious, feminine, and rosy hands: those of Jarboe, of her chants, her masked liturgical little theaters, her never too idolized vocal gifts....

The best album ever, along with the twin album "Love of Life", from my beloved SQUANSI... forever.... a chrysanthemum on my grave, a breath of wind... a last sensual, fleeting, cadaverous kiss... and, please, note the cover, so placid, so naively reassuring....