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Sister albums are cool. They're not double albums, obviously (or sometimes, as in Big Blood's case, not that obviously), but they maintain a relationship that, as you listen to the one, makes you aware of the other. Like Ten New Songs and Dear Heather: very different records (within Leonard Cohen's body of work, anyway), but linked in their being the two soundings from the Mt. Baldy years, and in their songs having similarly modest and artfully "Muzaky" arrangements, as well as in that each is a collaboration with a long-standing co-writer/backing singer, Sharon Robinson and Anjani Thomas respectively. Dear Heather is a corrective to Ten New Songs' formality and seriousness, while Ten New Songs, with its thick mood and unabashed devotion to dinky arrangements made transcendent, creates a path for Dear Heather, and clears away the need for the younger sister to be brimful of traditionally accomplished songs, since the elder had enough of those.
When I think about Love of Life, I invariably wonder: which record do I really like more, it or White Light from the Mouth of Infinity? They are both excellent, singular (or... doubular) things, staunch messengers from the same post-Burning World here-we-go-back-to-the-independent-grind era, with a lot of the same band members, both with amazing Deryk Thomas front covers, both gutted later and reshaped into the single-album compilation that Gira frowningly titled Various Failures... and yet, like the Cohens, they have their meaningful differences, their various positions. White Light (a double album, which typically means I should like it more) bludgeons and mourns. Love of Life makes room for different kinds of tracks, and its interludes are as beautiful and usually more arresting than the full-fledged songs. White Light broods with the stormiest-browed of the warrior gods, while Love of Life has more cheerful-sounding Gira songs (and/or refrains) in one place than any Swans or Angels of Light album. Love of Life's rage is like that of a waterspout moving across the open sea: strong and violent, to be sure, and amazing to look upon, but enveloped in and surrounded by a stillness and mystery vaster, more enduring, more patient, and ultimately more frightening than it. White Light from the Mouth of Infinity has more good songs (including Love Will Save You, my gateway into the pre-Angels Swans), but Love of Life gives its songs a more striking, evocative context.
The songs are not really the point. With Gira, the great songwriting didn't begin until he made a conscious effort to write great songs, around the time of Soundtracks from the Blind, leading into New Mother. The point, as in most Swans records from the '80s and '90s, is songlike mood exercises. Lyrics and melodies exist to make the fog more total. Love of Life picks up where the light-melodic/dark-pounding concoctions hinted at on The Burning World and featured on White Light from the Mouth of Infinity left off. To bolster and off-set these comes the marvelous series of instrumental mood pieces called (---), sometimes with spoken word fragments atop them, sometimes composed of eerie, melodic figures, sometimes both. They are sad and touching in ways that the actual songs aren't. But the actual songs, made stark by the interludes, feel more imposing, more monolithic, with these gentle valleys around them, than they did lined up in the crowded, unbroken splendor of White Light from the Mouth of Infinity.
But just about that band sound—and the following description applies to both albums, the difference being that Love of Life came out sounding clearer, more pristine—which I'm not saying is better, since what's not to love about some really good murk—in any case: what a blend of light and darkness! The keyboards, the electric and acoustic guitars, the cymbals, and Jarboe's vocals all grasp heavenward, while the bass with its resonant reverb, the toms and bass drum, and Gira's vocals fight to stay sprawled out in the soil, mouth full of earth.
My favorite track is the (---) before The Other Side of the World, followed by the one between Identity and In the Eyes of Nature. Favorite "song," to be stricter about it, is The Golden Boy That Was Swallowed by the Sea (I mean, you'd have to be a jerk to give a less-than-awesome song such an awesome title; this applies also to The Burning World's opener, The River that Runs with Love Won't Run Dry). Or Amnesia, into which Gira breathed new life and music some thirty years later, for the album Leaving Meaning—a choice dictated by the lyrics, apparently, but interestingly, Amnesia is the one song on either White Light from the Mouth of Infinity or Love of Life that sounds most like the kinds of Swans songs Gira would write in the band's second chapter, in the years after Angels of Light, even down to a couple of uncanny details: the sinister synth fanfare in the refrain which sounds like the screeching instrument that plays lead for a while in the song The Seer, and the "Amnesia-na-na-na" phrasing picked up in Mother of the World. Favorite riff/progression is the one that opens In the Eyes of Nature. The song I could most easily do without is No Cure for the Lonely, which is missing from all LP versions of Love of Life, and thus can in fact, justifiably, be done without.
Today, as it happens, I suspect that I prefer Love of Life to White Light. But if the urge to jot down a few things about this period of Swans had come over me last month, or next month, or last week, or next week, it might well have been White Light from the Mouth of Infinity's cover art that graced the top of this post, and you would have found me arguing its case over Love of Life, presumably with recourse to its being a double album, and to pinnacles like Song for Dead Time, Love Will Save You, and The Most Unfortunate Lie, and (speak of pinnacles) to Gira instating the outtake Blind as an official part of the tracklist in the album's 2015 reissue. But, well, sister albums, you see.
(Back to: A Personal Canon)
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