Band:	Swans
Album:	Birthing
Style:	Post-rock
Release date:	May 30, 2025
A review by:	RaduP

01. The Healers
02. I Am A Tower
03. Birthing
04. Red Yellow
05. Guardian Spirit
06. The Merge
07. Rope
08. Away

Swans and their excess are here to stay. For now.

I'm not super fond of covering bands and artist that have been around for so long that, when their albums start talking about death and mortality in such an introspective way the way that The Beggar did, you get the feeling that you might be seeing the last of them. You know they're not getting any younger and that death is unpredictable and unavoidable, and one day there will be a definite final album from them. You don't know whether that's the one that you're listening to and writing about, you just know that it could be. That's why I hated writing about the last few Ozzy Osbourne albums, even Scorpions who had two albums that spelled "final album" before giving up and just releasing more music that doesn't even allude to it. In this point in their career, Swans flirted with that finality, but have instead decided to stay steadfast in just making more music. Thus Swans lives on.

Not only does Birthing affirm that Swans as a musical output of Michael Gira will live on, but also Swans as a band. There was a brief moment in time, after the monolithic trilogy of The Seer, To Be Kind, and The Glowing Man was concluded where Swans went through a sort of transformation after announcing that the band would stop touring, hinting at the band's dissolution. An album still arrived from Swans, in the form of Leaving Meaning., though one that saw Swans as more of a rotating collective of musicians around Michael Gira, making that album a more collaborative yet slightly disjointed affair. The Beggar did away with that collective feeling, forming a more proper lineup. And now Birthing solidifies that lineup, adding only Norman Westberg as a proper member once again (though he did contribute on The Beggar). This sevenfold lineup does also contain five of the seven people that were part of the band during the preceding trilogy, so in the end the little shakeup that Leaving Meaning. caused still left most of the pieces in place.

Even with the thematic emphasis on rebirth, contrasting the mortality one from the preceding album, Michael Gira's statement about this being the last Swans album to focus on "all-consuming sound worlds", meaning that there is still some feeling of finality on the record, though one more focused on the more impersonal end of a sound. The "all-consuming sound worlds" that Gira references probably points to the huge sonic excess of the post-rock sound that Swans have dabbled in since The Seer more than ten years ago. Even if Leaving Meaning. toned things down a bit both from a runtime and sonic perspective, The Beggar returned to two-hour long runtimes, but it is Birthing that seems to more explicitly evoke the famous trilogy.

I did find it odd that this album eschewed the usual release schedule of being preceded by a fundraiser album, one that would contain acoustic demo versions of what would come, instead songs from this album made their way to the band's live setlist when touring for the previous record (which means I heard some of it live already), and thus ending up on Live Rope. Getting to compare how the band's live improvisational approach took The Beggar's ten minute long title track and transforming it into a fifty minute behemoth, and then taking the opposite approach of hearing how the live versions of "Rope" and "Birthing" fared in their studio version only enforces the tour de force that the band is as a live unit.

Musically, I'm struggling between finding Birthing redundant, having already heard many iterations of this sound, one that also thrives on excessive runtimes, to the point where I'm not sure more of it is really that necessary; and finding Birthing to be a better representation of this sound than both Leaving Meaning. and The Beggar were, and in a way serving as a last squeeze of all the creative juices that would go into this sound. The one defining characteristic of how Birthing tackles this neo-Swans sound seems to be a grandiose ethereal sense of being in the womb. A lot of it, from the ethereal backing vocals on the title track to the nods to David Bowie's "Heroes" on "I Am A Tower" to how "Rope (Away)" takes from the crescendocore of post-rock bands that were influenced by the band, feels brighter than what we've come to expect from the band.

The Beggar often gave me the feeling that the buildups are better than the releases of tension, and that's something that still somewhat of an issue here, but Birthing does a better job of structuring the songs to make the diminished releases have less of an effect. Some transitions between songs, like "Red Yellow" 's sudden stop do feel a bit jarring, though not enough to significantly derail the album's flow the way that I feel Leaving Meaning. suffered from feeling too disjointed. There are noisier experimental bits, including wilder saxophones and percussion in tracks like "Red Yellow" and "The Merge" that offer some balance to the long-winded repetitive buildups of other tracks.

I'm curious how kind time will be to Birthing, once the saturation of this exact sound will become less of an issue for its contextualization. Even that contextualization requires an enormous amount of listening, because I have to admit that even though I loved the trilogy I keep referencing, I don't think I've given any of those albums a full relisten since I first got around to them, and I might actually find that I enjoy Birthing more than The Glowing Man. One day (probably more than a week) I'll have to take the time, in a context outside of me having to talk about that specific album, to see how those hold up. The excess issue that those albums have, is the exact problem that Birthing has. It's the problem of having to make so much time to revisit it, and then having the option of picking an equally immense and potentially better Swans album instead.