Swans – ‘The Beggar’ album review: a dense and dissonant descent
After having their 2019 tour cancelled because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Swans needed to reset in order to adapt. Specifically, band leader Michael Gira needed money in order to record his latest set of songs. So, as a way of raising funds for sessions, Gira released an acoustic demo album entitled Is There Really a Mind? in 2022. In the age of crowdsourcing, Gira had allowed for another Swans album through sheer force of will.
Now, a year later, we’re getting the final versions of those same songs with The Beggar. If it wasn’t immediately clear why Swans needed lengthy studio time and resources in order to bring the album to life, the answer comes when you look at the album’s total runtime. Whereas Is There Really a Mind? clocked in at 70 minutes, The Beggar is a massive 121 minutes.
To anyone that actually gets through the entirety of The Beggar, you have my respect. I did, but I didn’t actually realise ahead of time that it would take a full two hours of my time. That feature-length approach allows for quite a bit of extended experimentation, but Swans spend as much time meandering as they do exploring. That’s one of the charms of The Beggar – you can put it on, zone out, and suddenly come to without fully understanding just how much time has passed.
As a whole, the album’s tone is dark, mysterious, and lingering. Tracks like the opening one-two punch of ‘The Parasite’ and ‘Paradise is Mine’ slip and crawl in an unhurried fashion, taking elements from noir films, ragtime jazz, doom metal, and the band’s own no wave genre. Gira’s rickety baritone is as languid and drawling as it has ever been. As a combination of haunting narrator and harbinger of doom, Gira’s signature ominous bray frequently moans and gargles its way throughout the seemingly-endless songs.
Lest you think you can get off easy with the album’s ten-minute title track, or even the relatively short tracks like ‘Los Angeles: City of Death’ and ‘Unforming’. It’s all a warmup for the album’s epic-length centrepiece, ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’. A 43-minute odyssey through some kind of nightmarish wasteland, complete with church bells, screams, drones, erupting drums, death, and righteous squalls of noise, ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’ is the most ambitious and cinematic song that Swans ever birthed.
If you happen to make it all the way to the end of the album, one final nightmare awaits in the form of the raga-rock track ‘The Memorious’. If your brain hasn’t been fried by the endless repetition, random noises, and strange terrains of the album’s two-hour dive into the depths of hell, ‘The Memorious’ gives you one final trip down below.
Interminable song lengths and a complete absence of accessible melodies mean that most casual listeners won’t give The Beggar a chance. In fact, unless you bought Is There Really a Mind?, there’s probably nothing that will attract you to The Beggar. But there’s something perfect about Gira forsaking compromise and only playing to the most dedicated of listeners. As he approaches 70, there isn’t a single fuck left for Gira to give, and you can hear that all over The Beggar.
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