Musically, The Beggar completes the process of transformation that began when the most widely celebrated incarnation of Swans wound down in 2017. Yet another gives the perspective of a deity who knows that they only exist because humans commit sacrifices in their name. One song immerses the listener in the point of view of a person yearning to be activated by holy instruction, while a couple others long as intensely for the release that comes by embracing some variety of annihilation. And Gira is more interested in engaging with the archetypal human motivations that drive those patterns than he is in weighing in on their most current iterations.Īccordingly, the latest Swans album is a series of exhaustive depictions of individuals dissolving into or materializing out of roiling, collective states. Whatever shenanigans people have been up to during our recent dark age are just reruns of scenes that have been enacted since humans painted their first creative representations of stuff that may or may not have happened on the walls of caves.

Inside the first minute of “The Parasite,” which kicks of the digital and CD (but not LP) editions of The Beggar, Swans mainman Michael Gira intones the words, “All information is equally true.” Before it ends, he ponders, “I wonder if your breathing is stealing all the air.” One might suppose that he’s dealing with our current age of disinformation and distrust, but Gira is not the sort of writer to confine his attention to present-day events.

Parasite in city death scenes