Swans – Birthing

Having listened to this album once, I can only offer my first impression, but I would say this sits up there happily with the trilogy quality wise. The sound sits somewhere between the trilogy and Leaving Meaning/The Beggar with Gira’s acoustic guitar ages being quite prominent in parts, (which reminds me of some of the gentler moments of recent albums) only to build to an explosive climax reminiscent of the trilogy.

Having heard a few of these songs on their recent live album Live Rope, it’s hard to look at the studio versions through a new lens (Birthing, Rope, Away) but they do still remain strong as studio tracks. Among the new tracks “The Merge” definitely stands out from a first listen. Definitely one of the grooviest bass riffs I’ve heard from them in recent memory. (A Little God In My Hands, Hanging Man vibes)

The DVD is a nice extra, consisting of an almost hour long Gira solo concert, which implements some arthouse film elements. (The opening song “The Parasite” is intercut with footage of what I assume to be real parasites) With the longer being a performance of the nearly 90 minute Rope/The Beggar that incorporates video footage from various concerts. The DVD quality is very compressed across the board and I do wish that these extras were issued on a high def disc or even a thumb drive like the full version of Live Rope.

As far as the pressing goes, absolutely zero complaints from me. I was keeping an open mind after the quality control for “The Beggar” seemed to take a massive dip, with my copy from Young God arriving quite dirty and suffering from numerous ticks and pops even after being cleaned multiple times.

I cleaned this record before listening and it played through beautifully, great dynamics when played loud, as all swans albums should be:)

As a side note, the songs on the vinyl version of this album do appear in a slightly edited form. I checked the runtimes against streaming and a few of them do run a couple of minutes short.