In the half-decade since Swans reformed, they have hammered away at a monolithic, all-consuming sound with unwavering focus. The three albums they've released since Michael Gira resurrected the project—2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, 2012's The Seer, and 2014's To Be Kind—taken together with contemporaneous tours and live albums, all feel like variations upon a single theme, expressions of an essential Swans-ness.
For a while, though, they were the most mutable of bands. In a half-decade span beginning in the mid '80s, they swiftly transformed from bone-crushing no wave brutalists to God-fearing gothic rockers, and then to featherweight neo-folkies. White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life, originally released in 1991 and 1992, respectively, marked the end of that metamorphosis, as the band settled into a sound at once songful and vast, luminous as a glass menagerie and forceful as a falling anvil.
The two albums have long been treated as minor works in Swans' discography: out of print for years, they were cherry-picked (alongside selections from 1989's major-label fiasco The Burning World and the Gira/Jarboe side project the World of Skin) for 1999's inauspiciously titled Various Failures 1988-1992. "I'm ambivalent about much of it, but then what do I know????" Gira has written of the music on that anthology. "Some of it is genuinely good I think. Anyway, I was learning (how to write a song) as I went."
It's true that the period marked a shift from pummeling mantras to something more "musical," with singing instead of shouting and cascading chords instead of just drop-tuned gut-punches. That said, even here, Gira's concept of "songwriting" remains idiosyncratic: there's little in the way of verse/chorus structures, mainly just mantra-like incantations and chords wreathed around gleaming pedal tones surrounded by wide-open expanse. Drummers Anton Fier (White Light) and Vincent Signorelli and Ted Parson (Love of Life) lay into their snares with military gusto, driving the music forward in surging tattoos, and their nonstop rattle contributes to a sensation of overwhelming excess. Close your eyes, and you can practically see the sounds exploding like fireworks against the darkness of your lids.
The textures and tone colors are well suited to Gira's favorite themes, like love, death, and the sublime. Where early Swans lyrics were notable largely for their grueling power dynamics and limitless abjection—see "Raping a Slave", "Filth", "Cop", etc.—here Gira explores a more nuanced perspective. It's hardly all kittens and rainbows; both albums are littered with ugliness, from the dirge-like "Better Than You" ("So glad I'm better than you," he sings, in the world's most dead-eyed Dear John letter) to the claustrophobic "Amnesia", where he tells us "sex is a void filled with plastic" and "everything human's necessarily wrong." Gira has rarely wallowed as beautifully as he does on "Failure", one of the great nadirs—in the best way possible—of the band's catalog. Over bluesy acoustic guitar and frigid digital synthesizers, his preacher's drawl drips like blood from a stone; it would be hard to imagine a voice with more gravitas.
But Gira has never met a dichotomy he could resist—he eats love and hate, sprinkled with a bit of good and evil, for breakfast—and here we can see the pendulum beginning to tip from darkness back to daylight. "Her" wraps clanging, Children of God-style thunderbolts around one of the tenderest love songs Gira has ever written, and "Song for the Sun", "Love of Life", and "The Sound of Freedom" all stretch their arms wide to embrace the limitless possibility of the universe, anticipating the way that love and spiritual ecstasy will return to the fore in the group's post-reunion work, particularly on 2014's To Be Kind.
A bonus disc accompanying the reissues is mostly anticlimax. It features a handful of alternate takes and mixes from both albums, along with a Burning World-era B-side, selections from the World of Skin's Ten Songs for Another World, and a few live songs from Omniscience and Anonymous Bodies in an Empty Room, plus another live cut, "The Unknown", that doesn't seem to have been released before but probably could have stayed that way. There's a fair amount of overlap with Various Failures, and the sequencing is haphazard, zigzagging from release to release without much rhyme or reason.
But it's never a bad thing to be reacquainted with Jarboe's harrowing rendition of Nick Drake's "Black Eyed Dog", and her a cappella rendering of "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes", a centuries-old popular English song, is a welcome addition. (Both are from the World of Skin's 1990 album Ten Songs for Another World.) That the bonus disc leaves off "God Damn the Sun", The Burning World's heartbroken highlight, seems like a missed opportunity. In fact, at this point, a full Burning World reissue (along, perhaps, with both the band's 1988 "Love Will Tear Us Apart" covers) is long overdue, no matter how much Gira professes to regret making that album. Who knows, maybe he'll eventually come around. But for now, for anyone who wants to understand Swans' path from atonal self-flagellators to beatific supplicants of the sublime, these two reissues light the way, blindingly.
