SWANS - the Burning World

I'm reviewing my record collection...here's my entry on my favorite swans album:

One of several masterpieces by SWANS,this is their major label debut/swansong. It was clear from their last EP on Caroline, a lovely Joy Division cover, that they were maturing to this point, and while the ambitious 'Children of God' double album before it had shown how diverse they could be, 'The Burning World' was infinitely more focused, a concise assimilation of everything they'd ever done. On top of all that, it was friendly and beguilingly listenable.
They were signed to UNI records, which was the long defunct label that was an MCA subsidy that hadn't been active since Elton John had recorded on it in the early '70s. The label was meant to be a sort of alternative off-shoot for MCA, who had a hard time signing and promoting alternative/punk/ etc. back then. So UNI had SWANS, the Fine Young Cannibals (the only act to have a hit on UNI), Steve Earle and Transvision Vamp. The label folded while SWANS were on tour. They actually toured this album harder than the others and came through Austin twice on the same tour (and were amazing!).

Produced by Bill Laswell, the album was expensive as hell to make, and was taut with dramatics before it even came out. Laswell recruited a number of players he worked with regularly, Fred Frith, Nicky Skopelitus, Shankar, Trilock Gurtu, and the Fowler bros. on backing vocals. My good friend Jason Asnes, who was the bassist for Nice Strong Arm, played bass on it, and was to have been a full-fledged member of the band. When Michael Gira asked him to join it was stressed to him that he needed to quit NSA and be a full-time Swan. He declined and, in retaliation, Jason's picture was literally blacked out on the back cover and he was credited as a session player instead of being a SWAN. When I first spoke to Gira, in 1992, he was still disgusted with the situation, both the state of the band, Jason, and how this album came about and ended up. He was annoyed that the album was so expensive he could never afford to buy it back from MCA (UNI's parent company), and frustrated that it was already impossible to find by then. Laswell was somewhat foisted upon him by the label, a tough thing to swallow for a control freak like Gira. It's pretty much the only SWANS album like this, with so many outside players, and yet it remains my favorite. I just love the songs and, with or without the production intrusions, the SWANS sound was never one that was going to make to radio, or any sort of mass culture, and just what the f*ck they were doing on a major never made any sense to me, aside from the fact that some people saw them as a GOTH band, and Goth bands were getting signed to majors left and right. They were never a goth band, but they were a band for people who wore black, and they had grown so far away from the NYC noise scene they had started in.

What stuns me the most about this album, aside from how beautiful it's packaged, is just the depth and extreme quality of the songs, both in sound and in how they are written. Jarboe's vocal's on the Blind Faith cover "Can't Find My Way Back Home" is easily her best moment. In later SWANS efforts her songs were (not unlike Kim Gordon's SY contributions) rather shrill and annoying, and it was only when she drifted back towards subtlety that I truly enjoyed her work. They had wonderful taste in cover versions, however rarely they did them, from their World of Skin covering Nick Drake to this song and their masterful Joy Division cover (which I guess is where people got the idea they were "goth"). The apex of the album is dead center in "(She's a) Universal Emptiness," the first song with any intensity on the album, and one of Gira's best ever. In "Saved" the semi-spiritual overtones from the heavily conflicted 'Children of God' album are again evident, but also are much more muted, as though he's found a resolve, found the answer. The album ends with two more intense tunes, "See No More" and "God Damn the Sun," two songs that really came alive in the context of their live shows. As hard as it may be to believe, Gira, Jarboe and Norman Westberg (and their touring rhythm section) were quite able to reproduce this album live , and it was my favorite era of SWANS that I saw live, even though the '88 show I saw was more intense, the '92 version more varied, and the '95 version (featuring AMC's Vudi on second guitar) was completely amazing in its own way. For all of the right reasons, this is the ultimate SWANS album, even if they were more this and more that before and after this weird in between album, mostly because it shows just what they were capable of, but also just because it's the one I reach for when I get the urge to hear them.