Review Summary: Received the new mind.
Children of God, by
Swans
Genres: Experimental Rock, Folk Rock, maybe also Gothic Rock
Released: October 19, 1987
Studio: Caroline Records
To be honest, it feels like I’ve only been killing time by not reviewing this album before the LPs that preceded it. Yes, the no wave era is crucial, it has its moments, and
Holy Money is admittedly dope, but
Children of God is where
Swans really found their footing, and Michael Gira developed a seemingly insatiable need to innovate his band’s sound every one or two albums. What resulted was arguably the most conceptually cohesive record Swans have made to date… well, I guess there’s
Soundtracks for the Blind, which plays out like a compilation of abstract short films reminiscent of David Lynch, but comparatively it’s so all over the place and broad in its influences that it almost feels too fractured for my taste. Anyway, to the album.
“New Mind” is easily one of the strongest contenders for the best opener Swans have ever recorded; it’s completely at home with everything else Swans have made up to this point, but something’s different. It’s atonal as all hell, like contemporary Swans listeners would no doubt expect, but it’s atonal in a far more melodic way, if that makes any sense, and Jarboe’s keyboard add a touch of grandiosity that I find most of their previous material didn’t have. Michael Gira’s delivery is different, too; no longer bellicose howling, but sonorous spoken word. Where in previous albums Gira was so actively combative that the music itself seemed to be screaming "STAY AWAY!”, for once he doesn’t seem to be wanting to kill his audience; now, he sounds like he’s trying to sell you something. His performance is brilliant; there’s a real swagger to his voice which lends it a charisma that stands in stark contrast to the music, and his meter is much more deliberate. The call and response vocals are also a nice touch, it complements Gira’s performance and reinforces the character he’s playing, which is that of a deluded preacher so crazed that he fails to see the inherent contradiction in bellowing “Save your soul! Damn you to hell!” over and over again.
“In My Garden” comes as a complete shock, especially if you started with
Filth; for once, Algis Kizys’ bass is clean and actively melodic, and Jarboe sings beautifully about a garden, presumably Eden, while playing piano almost more for atmosphere than anything else. The change inside might not be completely unprecedented if you listened to
A Screw and heard the first incarnation of “Blackmail”, but this is an even better demonstration of Swans’ range, and also revealing of the dual nature of this album. Though it functions as a necessary break from Gira being… well, Gira, the synths that take over at the end serve to remind of the album’s darkness, it sounds like the garden, a place of innocence, is being corrupted and tainted simply by featuring in a Swans album.
“Our Love Lies” is another unexpected moment at this point in the band’s career; it’s an honest-to-God folk rock song, the obvious germination of ideas that would ultimately result in the founding of the Gira folk rock side-project
the Angels of Light, and it almost sounds like prototypical Gothic country, too. The music only further establishes a sense of melody people might not have thought Swans possessed until now, and the electric guitar interjections sound so close to truly worshipful that the song might sound unironically Evangelical if it was sung by anyone other than Michael Gira. While it’s admittedly not the best demonstration of his range, it at least confirms that he can sing cleanly when he wants to, and is also at his most comfortable in the second octave, spending much of the song hitting some damn fine low Es.
“Sex, God, Sex” begins as a direct continuation of “Our Love Lies”, with Gira singing the same vocal melody against music that engages me far more than it has any right to, considering that it’s just E, A, then a descending glissando right back down to E. The key change halfway through precipitates a more developed melody, played by guitars so heavy that the first time I listened to it I wondered, not for the first time, if this is what doom metal sounds like. It also shows a clear progression between songs; it begins with almost solemn worship, albeit with increasingly obvious undertones of degradation that sounds to me like an apostate begging for mercy. This builds to Gira being so cowed by his own view of God that his demands border on fetishistic, openly asking for debasement, demanding punishment for his sexual urges, and proclaiming his worthlessness in the face of a power as all-encompassing and unknowable as God. It’s a nice moment of symmetry on this album, and it won’t be the first, either.
“Blood and Honey” has the most foreign-sounding instrumentation in the entire album, with what sounds like a bouzouki carrying the melody. Jarboe shows off the lowest reaches of her range, delivering a murder ballad that reads to me like an alternate telling of the Book of Exodus where Jochebed commits infanticide. The second verse, which spoken word, unnerves me even more. The cold, deadpan delivery makes it sound like a suicide pact. Absolutely chilling, and a highlight in Jarboe’s tenure with Swans.
“Like a Drug (Sha La La)” is a real lurcher of a track; it wouldn’t sound out of place in
Cop or
Greed, with the same two atonal chords being played relentlessly, but the extra instrumentation ground this song in the album it was made for, with erratic trumpet flourishes and dissonant strings soundtracking what sounds like some sort of sexual or tantric ecstasy, which by itself might sound innocent, but with this sort of music it sounds like a threat instead. The refrain is almost as evil, with deliberately dissonant singing in apparent mockery of choral singing.
“You’re Not Real, Girl” is another folk song, and the addition of synthesized strings make the song feel as hollow as Gira himself when singing this song. Fucking hell, the man just sounds so defeated, singing about feeling unloved by this girl he feels he doesn’t know. There isn’t much else I can say about this, this is simply one of the most depressing songs Swans have ever made. “Beautiful Child” isn’t beautiful in the least; it begins startlingly with gunshots, then settles into an atonal march, with a rhythm section so forceful it sounds like it might be timpani, and horn flourishes that add a touch of epicness worthy of the Old Testament. Jarboe’s also there being a one-woman choir, sounding like an entire legion of angels; not angels as we see them today, however, but the Old Testament cosmic horror sort, the seraphim and ophanim, bringing me to the lyrics, which are about the Binding of Isaac. No, not the indie game, I’m talking about that part of the book of Genesis where God trolls Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son to prove his faith, and the man nearly goes through with it before an angel stops him and tells him that it’s just a prank, bro. A gross simplification, I know, but that’s about all I could come up with in trying to concisely summarize it.
In typical Swans fashion, Gira sounds like he really wants to kill the titular child; his performance is goddamn terrifying, the screamed lyrics becoming so increasingly deranged that they morph into something symbolic enough that some people think it’s about the death of innocence, or Gira destroying that innocent part of himself. I still stand by the interpretation I first proffered, though, because Swans can be quite direct when they want to be, and this seems like one of those moments that really should be taken at face value.
“Blackmail,” though evil in different ways, is a much needed moment of respite, with lilting piano and oboe whole notes so beautiful it almost distracts from the lyrical subtext, which is about gaslighting. Yes, it looks innocent on the surface without the context of the next song, but trust me, it’s called “Blackmail" for a reason. “Trust Me” begins almost as softly, retaining the oboe at first but with more urgency, and Gira’s playing his acoustic guitar in such a syncopated fashion that it almost sounds like 7/8 to my ears, though Swans are almost never that adventurous in choice of meter, so it’s more likely common time with an odd rhythm. Then the entire band comes in, and possibly startles the hell out of first time listeners, with Gira singing about how we can trust him with a tone that indicates no trust on his end at all. Weirdly, the song ends calmly with a field recording of running water, like it’s trying to reclaim the beauty of “Blackmail.”
“Real Love,” as you might have come to expected by now, is ironically titled, detailing a one-sided devotion set to twisting banjo passages and eerie harmonica solos. The one criticism I have is that it’s a slight retread of “Sex, God, Sex,” but otherwise, it’s yet another effectively creepy moment in an album full of such moments. “Blind Love” starts off with spoken word; this is the most evil Gira’s sounded since “Beautiful Child,” drawing out every syllable in a deeply uncomfortable antinatalist narrative that takes the most striking images of Evangelical views on birth and taking them to a ridiculously nightmarish extreme. The music is almost as terrifying, building tension for three minutes with severely dampened guitars before the rest of the band finally comes in and subsiding just as suddenly. There’s a fitful energy to the song, you’re never sure when the other musicians will come in again, so when they do they’ll probably scare the everloving shit out of you. Speaking for myself, I’ve heard this album six times now, and it startles me every sodding time.
Closer and title track “Children of God” is an inversion of “New Mind” in several ways while also being a marriage of Gira’s malevolence and Jarboe’s balladry; being sung by Jarboe rather than Gira is just the start. In “New Mind,” Gira sounds like he’s trying to violently induct you into a cult, Jarboe’s presence is considerably lighter. There’s still a sort of darkness to this song, especially in the abrupt organ passages, but it’s much less obvious, and there’s a feeling of conclusiveness which tells that you’re through the worst of it. “Children of God” also provides a nice sense of symmetry to the album; it began with worship led and motivated by fear and what sounds like a false prophet, and it ends with earnest prayer and wholehearted devotion to a potentially more forgiving God. The arrangement is odd, but strangely engrossing; though the song’s in common time, certain instruments come in at strange places, often on the offbeats, creating a polyrhythmic effect while shifting the instruments’ place in the arrangement in the mix so subtly that I don’t often notice they’ve switched places until it’s already happened. The same effect extends to Jarboe; the song steadily accrues several layers of Jarboe vocals, all singing the same lyrics, but minutely shifting between each other in bizarrely satisfying syncopation, and together with the swirling, restless music, I find it creates an illusion of rubato without her ever changing tempo.
Children of God is arguably the most important album Swans have ever made. Not only did it refine a style of playing and songwriting that they’d been using from the very beginning, but it also established Michael Gira’s seemingly insatiable urge to innovate Swans’ sound every two or three album cycles. It retains the best elements of their no wave material and breathes new life into them, with varying degrees of more melody and more focused, controlled musicianship, and it also broadened their instrumental palette significantly, with acoustic guitar and piano especially, alongside orchestral elements which would have much more of a presence during their reunion, especially from
The Seer onwards.
The sequencing is also fecking brilliant, lending the album a real ebb and flow. Though it creates an atmosphere of violence both blatant and implied, the moments of peace, even when linked to the grimness of the rest of the album at large, are always welcome, and it gives a sense of pacing that their previous albums direly lack by comparison. The dynamic between Gira and Jarboe also plays heavily into this, giving the album a personality that feels more binary than it really is, given that they’re both evil in different ways. Jarboe’s a wonderful foil to Gira; where Gira’s songs and lyrics are often direct to the point of potential blasphemy, Jarboe has a significantly softer touch, though even at its lightest, it’s almost always hiding something much wicked under the surface. Though it might appear profane due to its bluntness and hyperbolic extremes of fundamentalism and cultishness, be advised that it makes much more sense if you keep in mind that Gira was trying to steal televangelists’ thunder, though it is also an honest attempt at understanding faith and immersing himself in high religiosity. The only real criticism I have is that at times you can tell it was recorded in an abandoned sawmill, and the recording quality can suffer for it, but otherwise, it is a highlight of the Swans discography, and one so vital you can hear every future development to come in this album alone. Outstanding, and a great place to start if you’re looking to get into this band.
Favourite tracks: "Children of God", "New Mind", "Our Love Lies," "Beautiful Child", "Blood and Honey", "Blackmail"
Least Favourite: ...I don't know, "Blind Love"?
