My Review
Swans - White Light From the Mouth of Infinity
1991
Every change is the root that comes out of a tunnel without consciousness to find a dimension in front of the sun, air where you can free yourself in a path that can become flight.
In the year of the grunge invasion, when everything became noise and the beauty of the hinted and polished sound was only a hypothesis (an almost scandalous act to be able to think about it and a difficult act to be able to realize it), here the amazement managed to get space with this work in which Michael Gira and Jane Jarboe closed an attitudinal door to open a new room, a laboratory of new jewels to be smoothed and made perfect.
With this work, Swans became medieval knights, closed the shutters to modernity, stepped into a workshop to discover ancient mental tools and bid farewell to their previous sturdy path.
In short: they took leave of their sonic developments and became craftsmen hungry for attitudes and conclusions so distant from their usual approach that they generated with this double album a generous, powerful, absolutely surprising, granitic, marvellous shock.
They made folk gloom an obvious skill, combined with an imagery that took us through different and unpredictable scenarios.
They humbled themselves and, as if they were in a dusty workshop, they set about cleaning it well, using ancient tools such as study and the use of a restlessness that proved to be the main component in generating a nourishing masterpiece capable of displacing many souls who felt safe with their discography and artistic attitude.
The atmospheres, of which the album is a manifest poisonous and contagious procession, became an invasion in the paths of musical genres to knead and confuse them in the first place, and then to make developments and farewells, forbidding compromises and doubts, in order to free the warehouse of their imagination and new needs.
It was a work that gave the din a greater meaning of elements and heady developments, with contaminations in gathering that generated unity of intent and fresh forces.
It comes to be a movie for our eyes that made of their music a film on which the dramas of failures and stale identities unwilling to be scrutinised rested.
Opening a decade of music in this way is a gift granted to the priests of beauty, to the custodians of the intensity that inflates our minds with ardours and alleys in which to keep the compass of our wandering active and useful, knowing how to lead us safely to our destination.
Song by song
Better Than You
The album begins with life presenting itself through the gentle mode of communication of a newborn baby and then immediately enters a musical din that also immediately gives way to a psychedelic neofolk of poignant beauty.
Power and Sacrifice
The guitars, that have so much space in this work, enter to mix with a drumming which is powerful as is the bass, then the baritone voice compacts everything and the song immerses us in a dark and medieval atmosphere, where everything seems a rhythmic funeral procession.
You Know Nothing
Drops of Leonard Cohen and Douglas Pierce give Michael's initial vocals a powerful vibration where Jane's subtle voice manages to act as a cushion. Then everything rises up in a structure with Post-Rock characteristics which come close to the darkest Post-Punk.
Song for Dead Time
The smell that takes possession of our nostrils at the end of a violent storm becomes concrete in this song where Jane's voice comes down from the sky to give us strength and dreams.
This is the first example of how David Eugene Edwards's guitar in his 16 Horsepower seems to have drawn on Swans to give the most melancholic part of a song perfection.
Here everything becomes magical and able to give the restlessness a chance to be cuddled.
Will We Survive
Joy Division immersed in Post-Rock, the feeling that Coldwave is more an attitude than a musical genre is fully experienced here because of the way certain stylistic distances are connected. You can live, even for a few seconds, from minute 1,53 to 2,03, the nebulous contortions of the first Christian Death, and then you can continue with the song that seems a strong expression of Death in June. Wonderful journey through time and stylistic embraces. With an end that sounds like the drunken remnant of a dream.
Love Will Save You
Starting with an introduction that has so much of that garage part of the British scene of the 60s, but with that bass that hits like drums shows the will to depart from it, everything comes together in the guitar with kilos of rust and in keyboards that in their simplicity invite us to weep. This is an extraordinary display of talent that is set free in a flight where the notes are the arrows available to do so. The dramatic sense of Michael's almost crooning should be taught to children at school.
Failure
The perfection of a lightning bolt, with its oblique and neurotic trajectories, enters Failure's theatre, the bridge over which our consciences pass to seek a dialogue with fears and anxieties. In its musical minimalism, words and voice become a single God who makes us fragile.
Because what stands out in the seventh episode of the album is Michael's total ability to make us silent listeners, with his voice like a carpet of angular stones.
Song For the Sun
We are immediately surprised: an attack full of light mixed with fog that we didn't expect, vocals in the manner of Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground present as a minimal creative incentive, since the flour from Swans' sack is their own and of high quality. We move through the soundscapes while listening and everything is accomplished in the place of immersive well-being.
Miracle of Love
The title is enough...
But miraculous indeed is the song for its ability to awaken the limbs of our shrunken emotions. A suite divided into two parts that fits perfectly, starting from the intimacy of the lyrics and the music (with the majestic work of the two guitars and the bass) and then becoming an almost angry escape.
The whole artistic evolution of Swans is represented here and it's all about their love, which for us becomes a miracle to heal our soul...
Blind
Impressive concession almost Pop that makes our heart smile for its delicate and light structure. If we limit ourselves to the analysis of the music...
It seems to be a pillow to make us sleep a little, to prepare us for the final part of the album. How much Matt Berninger with his The National has drawn from Michael in his vocals is evident.
And on this song we can say that the sun kisses the night...
When She Breathes
Jane takes the throne and declares her power and intent over a river of dry, intersecting sounds towards the desert. There is a complex sense of fragility as we listen, and the way she sings becomes a display of talent that hypnotises us among dunes and dripping sand until the end, which smells of Arabia.
Why are we alive
The workshop is full of frenetic activity and ability and the atmosphere capable of enchanting is created, leading us to a chemical journey where everything is distorted, but reveals sanity and the possibility of seeing their aptitude for changes of course confirmed, giving multiple physicality to the mechanisms of composition.
The Most Unfortunate Lie
How to savour the end in the best way: entrusting to Swans the will to create a modern lullaby with sprinkles of ancient attitude to give to the created visions the possibility to become reality swollen with oxygen bubbles in which to indulge in light dance steps, while outside the sky is witness to this ability to make a song a faithful companion of life to close in a spectacular way an album that is absolutely forbidden to be missing in the library of our needs.
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
February 12 2022
https://music.apple.com/gb/album/white-light-from-the-mouth-of-infinity/1054671832
https://open.spotify.com/album/6l0Mh4mzIDkXASBXK3svEy?si=uiQyOjiQT4ehrY3xOuuGhg
