Swans - Feel Good Now (1987)

Here's another recent purchase inspired mainly by the fact of it having been reissued. I didn't pick it up at the time because it seemed to be Children of God live and I hadn't yet warmed to Children of God when it came out. Children of God sounded to me like they'd run out of steam, or at least that there was something missing. I returned to the fold a couple of years later with Love of Life, which was fantastic and seemed to represent a few stops down the line on the journey for which Children of God had been the first step, roughly speaking; but then going back to Children it still sounded long and underwhelming - a poor second to even the b-sides of its own singles.

I don't usually bother with live albums, preferring the stuff I already enjoy by whoever it happens to be without feeling the need to complete sets for the sake of it; but there are always exceptions, and this ended up being one of them. I failed to pick up Public Castration is a Good Idea at the time because I simply couldn't afford it, then bought the reissue in response to some vague feeling of having missed out, and I was shocked at how much better Greed sounded in a live setting; so I was sort of hoping Feel Good Now might be a better representation of what they were getting at with Children of God, and holy fucking shit…

I see it now. Where the Swans' - because referring to them without the definite article feels like an affectation - previous work was a sort of post-Whitehouse emotional extreme directed inwards, Children continued the theme into religious, or specifically Christian pastures as neither an endorsement nor a refutation of the same, but rather a summation of the absolute negation of self in a religious context, or that's how it now sounds to me. At the time I assumed they had just gone the way of Bob Dylan or Bon Jovi.

I don't know why these songs, if we're going to call them songs, work so much better on a stage, and work even transferred to a medium lacking the spectacle of the live performance, even with a sound of inevitably muddier quality than the studio versions, but the difference is fucking incredible. You can feel the sheer volume in the recording, the raw power of the dirge, and the intensity it communicates is not even merely Biblical, but positively Old Testament in its uncompromising invocation of terrible power and submission to the same. Sex God Sex, formerly a silly title for something that went on too long, could easily score one of those Biblical epics of the thirties or forties. It's music for the construction of great pyramids or the parting of the red sea and is, as such, absolutely crushing - the culmination of the Swans first five years. I've since gone back to Children of God, and if it sounds improved, it still doesn't quite transcend having served as a warm-up exercise for Feel Good Now.