The Water Rats, London
27th October 2007
Even though it’s about as far from the stuff he plays these days as a non-executive directorship is from a proper job, the spectre of Swans‘ Cop weighs heavily on proceedings tonight- particularly its mantric repetition of the phrase “THE HEAT… HURTS! THE HEAT… HURTS!” Mr Gira, avuncular and smiling, has decreed that the lights be turned on full. On the audience. And that the air-conditioning be turned off.
It’s fucking boiling. I dunno… if most performers did that, everyone’d fuck off. But we stay, because it’s Gira, and because in a strange way, the discomfort adds to the experience. And what an experience. Beginning with “God Damn The Sun” (from Swans’ criminally-underrated first major step away from noise The Burning World), Gira treats us to an hour or so of glorious miserablisim straddling the line between auteurism and outsider art with the hand of a master. He has the gift, like Nick Cave and Will Oldham, of writing songs which in the hands of anyone else would collapse under their own relentless gloominess into the depths of self-parody, yet here partake of both his well-publicised relentlessness and his less-often-appreciated gift for inspirational beauty. Even stripped down to the barest essentials of a voice (though it’s quite a voice, it has to be said) and an acoustic guitar, these songs still work. Basically, to cut a long story short (or “tl;dr”, as I believe the young people say these days) he’s a bloody good songwriter, in the old-fashioned, even “classic” sense.
Whether screaming his way through “My Brother’s Man” (from the latest Angels of Light album We Are Him) or gently Lou Reed-ing his way through the almost hymnlike “Destroyer”, Gira is every bit as compelling a spectacle solo, and every bit as captivating a performer, as when he’s backed up by a sonic wall of death. Introducing a bare-bones reworking of “The Rose Of Los Angeles” by telling us rather movingly about his late mother, his wicked sense of humour shines through with a display of impeccable timing suggesting that stand-up tragedian might be an alternate career path should the songs ever stop coming. See also Gira’s self-deprecating comments near the set’s end about it having been fifteen years before Swans were ever asked for an encore.
He finishes with “Blind”, still every bit as beautiful and tragic as ever (“But I was younger then/and young men never die”), and still one of the best songs he, or indeed pretty much anyone else, has written in the last couple of decades. To think he’s gone soft in his old age just because he’s not hidden under swathes of feedback is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of music. Gira’s still as powerful a force as ever he was.
