The Glowing Man

When Michael Gira announced The Glowing Man in 2016, he also announced the end of the band that made it. This was the last record by the Swans he had put together when he restarted the group in 2010, and in the note that came with it he thanked them and named them: Norman Westberg, Kristof Hahn, Phil Puleo, Christopher Pravdica and Thor Harris. From then on, he wrote, Swans would be him and “a revolving cast of collaborators”. The album came out in June on his Young God label and on Mute, eight songs in just under two hours.

The method was familiar. John Congleton recorded the band at Sonic Ranch near El Paso again, with further sessions at his Elmwood Studio in Dallas, at Studio Litho in Seattle and at CandyBomber in Berlin. Ingo Krauss and Doug Henderson mixed it in Berlin. Bill Rieflin returned, credited this time as “Hit Man and 7th Swan”, on drums, piano, synth and Mellotron. Gira told Music and Riots that the parts were recorded in bits and pieces, with hundreds of overdubs on some songs. He said they all knew it was “the last adventure involving all of us as a band”.

The title track, nearly 29 minutes long, grew out of the previous album’s centrepiece. Gira says “Toussaint L’Ouverture” had started to feel predictable on stage, so one night he began doing something else and the band followed him. The finished piece keeps a newly played section of “Bring the Sun”, because by his account they could not have performed it without that part, and it contains his favourite Zen koan. “Cloud of Forgetting” and “Cloud of Unknowing” are, in his word, prayers. They were informed by The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous medieval guide to union with God, which uses those two clouds as names for states of mind. The second runs 25 minutes, with a cello solo by the improviser Okkyung Lee and, as Pitchfork noted, Rieflin’s Mellotron rising about five minutes in. “The World Looks Red / The World Looks Black” sets new music to words Gira wrote around 1982 and left in his typewriter at the space he shared with Sonic Youth, where Thurston Moore picked them up for that band’s “The World Looks Red”.

Gira’s notes give the other songs plain purposes. He wrote “When Will I Return?” for Jennifer Gira to sing, as a tribute to her strength after what he called a deeply scarring experience; Pitchfork described it as a song about an assault she survived. He calls “Frankie M” a tribute and a best wish for a wounded soul, and “People Like Us” and “Finally, Peace.” farewell songs. He told Spectrum Culture that “Finally, Peace.” was written on acoustic guitar, finished before the band heard it, and not a statement about the group. The drawing on the cover is his own, made at the last minute after a plan to use characters for words like “glowing” and “man” in several languages started to look new age to him.

Reviews were warm, if cooler than for To Be Kind: AnyDecentMusic averaged 7.7 and Metacritic 81, against 8.6 and 88. The Arts Desk called it the band’s best, while Pitchfork (8.1) found it quieter and slighter than The Seer or To Be Kind, “constantly on the verge of fading into the ether”. Rolling Stone gave it three stars and called it the weakest of the three. Pitchfork pointed out that Gira wrote “When Will I Return?” before the singer Larkin Grimm accused him that February of raping her in 2008, an accusation he denied, and that hearing it after the accusation made it more unsettling.

The difference from the two records before it is the point. The Seer and To Be Kind grew out of material the band had worked up on stage for months; The Glowing Man was built in pieces, with hundreds of overdubs, and its choices are in plain view: a lyric from 1982 put back to work, a passage from the last album played again on purpose, two prayers built on a medieval text, a farewell at the end of each disc. Gira has said his work is less deliberate than people suspect. Here it is deliberate, and that costs it some of the menace of its predecessors while giving the line-up an ending that sounds planned and weighed. Swans toured the album into 2017 and have since made three more studio albums with a changing cast that has included several of those players.