21. Swans—Love of Life (1992)
Let's face it: this whole Moon-crashing-into-the-Earth situation I've come up with here isn't exactly uplifting. It's a bummer to a degree far above and beyond some guy at a party cornering you and telling you all about his divorce. It's the downer of all downers when it comes down to it. That being the case, how could I make this list and
not have Swans represented somewhere?
For reasons that are unclear to me, this seems to one of M. Gira and company's least well-known albums. It's strange because this is probably my favorite by them. There's just so much going on here that I find myself totally immersed every time I listen to it. Some songs, like the title track, have the kind of pounding industrial beats that many people seem to associate with Swans, while other tracks are quite folky and reminiscent of their album
The Burning World. Experimental interludes and snippets of found-sounds crop up frequently but then just as often bleed into tracks which have almost a pop structure to them. Not surprisingly there's the requisite brutality here but there is also sweetness, like memories of better times that have been cruelly torn away—even more so than on their other albums this is played up with Jarboe's etherial singing as a counterpoint to Gira's Johnny-Cash-on-suicide-watch vocalization.
This isn't simply another depressing album in the long line of depressing albums out there. It's so much more complex than that and so full of life in a strange way. It's filled with loss and regret and pain, but also tiny little glimpses of hope and triumph. It's an album that leaves you with a strange sense of longing for some kind of past that doesn't necessarily even belong to you. And those handful of sunlit peaks are what make the inevitable plunge back down into the abyss all the more harrowing.
Below is "Her", one of my favorite songs on
Love of Life. I don't know why but there's something I find incredibly haunting about the combination of the music and long sample of the woman's voice at the end.