The Swans album that Michael Gira hates his “stilted” vocals on
“Our music used to be like a giant fist,” Michael Gira told Seattle’s Rocket newspaper in 1989. “I don’t know what it is now.”
At the time, the Swans frontman was ostensibly promoting his band’s sixth studio album and their first and ultimately only major label release, The Burning World. This record was supposed to mark Swans’ transition into a slightly more approachable wing of the new “alternative” landscape following the unexpected success of their 1988 cover of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart‘. At least, that seems to be the way the execs at MCA Records envisioned it.
Instead, The Burning World would go down as a commercial failure and a highly polarising artistic side-step, with some Swans fans handing in their membership cards in angry protest over the album’s mellower, gentler vibe.
Gira felt like most listeners had a healthy open-mindedness, “but we get some people,” he acknowledged, “a very small minority, um, I guess they want to ‘thrash’ or something. Those are the same people that used to scream at us to get off stage when we played the stuff they want to hear now, because that wasn’t hip then, and now it’s hip.”
Gira was perfectly happy not being hip, of course, but Swans’ new direction on The Burning World didn’t end up sitting well with him either; not because he regretted toning down the noise and aggression, but more due to the fact that he’d surrendered a degree of control over the recording process. This included the use of session musicians in place of some of Gira’s usual Swans collaborators, as well as some stylistic choices he later chilled to.
“There’s some good songs on there,” a reflective Gira admitted in a 2011 interview with The Big Takeover. “I think ‘God Damn the Sun’ is a really good song. I just hate my horrible portentous voice on that. The orchestration’s nice, I guess. But I hate the way I sang on that record. It’s so stilted, it just makes me mortified. But I was learnin’ – you gotta embarrass yourself in public along the way.”
One man’s embarrassment can be another’s inspiration, as Gira’s voice on ‘God Damn the Sun’ sounds like a template for how The National’s Matt Berninger would approach his own vocals a little over a decade later.
In retrospect, The Burning World also wasn’t as much of a curveball as it might have felt like at the time. While it certainly bore little resemblance to the visceral sonic blasts of the first few Swans records, it was a fairly logical progression from 1987’s Children of God, and continued to incorporate more of the influence of Gira’s bandmate and partner, Jarboe. It was also, lest anyone ever think otherwise, just as dark as any record in the Swans catalogue, even if the acoustic, melodic arrangements initially suggested a potential easing of the old anxieties.
Many of the songs on The Burning World were inspired by the fear of environmental collapse, something Gira was a bit ahead of the curve on as a highly observant 35-year-old songwriter in the late ‘80s, when most people weren’t even recycling yet.
“Something I was constantly thinking about was just the end of human history,” Gira told the Rocket newspaper in 1989, “winding down into this horrible, sad, cancerous stew. It didn’t used to bother me because I guess I was more nihilistic, in a certain way, but as I’ve grown older, I care a little more about the stream of human history and about it continuing. I think there’s been some very noble and worthwhile things that people have done—isolated, mind you. It’s just sad to see so much entropy.”
