FEATURED IMAGE SWANS BY ALBERT LICANO
Tasked to describe Swans to a friend and convince him to join me at this sold out Lodge Room show, I wasn’t able to pinpoint any genre to pigeonhole the band into an understandable phenomenon. With a little research, Swans is usually categorized as a noise rock band, but even that is reductive given the band doesn’t necessarily need to be loud or noisy to be themselves. What makes Swans sound like themselves is their urge to connect to the spirit world. This can be done with excessive volume or hair-raising whispers, or it can be done through mantra-like repetition which they often utilize, or as I witnessed firsthand at the Lodge Room, a band can connect with the spirit world simply by creating so much sustained musical chaos that every witness becomes completely spellbound by awe.
To open the show, Swans steel guitar player, Kristof Hahn opened with moody ambient crooner tunes, the sort you might expect to accompany a David Lynch film or the slower side of an Orville Peck reverie. His voice was both sweet and seasoned, carrying the sort of pain that only comes with a life full of experiences both beautiful and tragic.
Once Kristof finished his set and returned to the shadows to join his band, we waited until the Swans ensemble cast of conjurers led by the legendary Michael Gira took the stage. Gita, who sat upon a chair only wielding an acoustic guitar while his band held various instruments of pure destruction, takes the form of a classical composer, orchestrating the music’s swings from one abyss of the soul to a different abyss of the soul in every turn of tone. You can fall into a pit of silence or be crushed under a wave of noise all within the span of a single Swans song.
This show’s setlist featured songs off of their most recent release, 2023’s The Beggar. It’s hard to tell if The Beggar aims to capture the live experience of seeing Swans or vice versa. I was hoping to hear a few more classics, wondering how such complexity could be captured live. Previous Swans material comes off as controlled chaos, but in the case of The Beggar and this show, the music was a pure barrage, constantly pushing you toward an edge. You feel a sense of fear at a Swans show, like what happens if the music pushes me passed my comfort zone. Once you’re pushed past that edge though, you feel the relief that you were not met with pain on the other side.
I was completely blown away by this performance. Every player was relentless and artful whether they needed to pound their instruments or gently grace them to texture out the silence. The show was both a summoning and a purge, music so spiritually inclined that demons and angels couldn’t help but spill out of the Lodge Room cracks to join the audience, only to be obliterated by the sound, like a laser beating into tattoo ink under the skin. I often compare music to a visual reference to help people understand the sound, and to me, Swans is like the Ingmar Bergman of music. They can be chaotic, dark, spiritual, macabre and cerebral just as much as they can be ordered, primitive, full of light and emotive. The films of Ingmar Bergman pull you through the winter of the soul, and that’s what Swans did to the Lodge Room before gently returning us to our feet to tread back into the late night shadows of Highland Park.
Words by: Rob Shepyer
Photos by: Albert Licano
