Soundtracks For The Blind is like a post-apocalyptic wasteland of an album. There may still be islands and isolated pockets of civilization, but for the most part, humanity (or music) as we know it is gone, baby, gone. Outside of those few understandable, classifiable outposts of humanity, what are we left with? Desolate, bleak and opaque emptinesses of unforgiving noise. Soundtracks For The Blind was Swans' send-off to the rest of the world, a last, screaming, poignant message before disappearing into their side projects.
Because that's all Swans are now: a side project, just as unworthy of the name as any of the 'Swans related projects' the troubled couple at the band's center have participated in over the years. Where they once reigned supreme as kings of noise, perennially eluding classification as they plumbed the depths of what music could be, they are now nothing but a faint post-rock echo of their former selves, robotically masturbating away in an uninteresting and unrewarding corner of the magnificent sexual arcade they exposed our ears to during their original run.
And it was one hell of a fucking run. Bursting like a slimy, unwelcome mushroom from the fertile soil of the early 80s New York noise scene, they began as a brutal, unrelenting auditory assault, with vocalist/guitarist/whatever-the-hell-it-takesist Michael Gira, the band's only permanent member, acting as commandant. The inhuman industrial harshness of Filth ('83), Cop ('84) and Young God ('84) relented somewhat with the addition of Jarboe on keyboards and backing vocals in 1985, resulting in the deft and somewhat digitized - but no less horrifying - Greed ('85) and Holy Money ('86).
In 1987, they made what many consider their greatest work: the glam-tinged goth excess that is Children Of God. It's a staggering record, over an hour of glorious theatricality that defies easy categorization, or indeed description. It hypnotizes as it anesthetizes, like binge-drinking your way through a satanic seance.
What followed was no less great, but a tad more subtle. Gira and Jarboe experimented away from the band as The World Of Skin, resulting in three fantastic albums, the first two earthy and vague and the third positively chipper in comparison, flirting as it does with acoustic folk-pop sensibilities and far gentler strokes than the couple were known for. Swans kept functioning contemporaneously, evolving in similarly radio-friendly ways with The Burning World ('89), White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity ('91) and Love Of Life ('92). They had the closest thing they ever would to commercial success when their cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart became a minor hit in 1988. The cover itself is forgettable, but it gave Gira a tantalizing glimpse of the mainstream recognition that he never seemed to forgive the world for denying him. This, perhaps, tinged his later work with even more pessimism and bleakness, including that of the album I'm ostensibly trying to write about here.
Come the mid-nineties, Swans had become an iron warhorse of a band, having gone through multiple lineups and redefinitions of their sound, and released the distinctly post-rocky The Great Annihilator in 1995. At the time, it must have seemed like that album was sealing their ultimate fate: noise pioneers turned alt-rock outsiders, a band that lived a very human lifetime in only thirteen years. They had been angry, squealing infants, opinionated and melodramatic youths, thoughtful adults and finally, bitter, withered seniors. When Gira announced that the next album would be their last, fans could not have expected more than a final whimper before his troops finally marched into the great unknown.
They could not have been more wrong. Soundtracks For The Blind is a two-and-a-half-hour explosion of exquisitely carved ambient soundscaping, punctuated by bursts of brutal post-rock at its murderous best and further audio experimentation that, at its best, melds the ambience with the rock, and even at its worst, provides wondrous twists and turns to the deranged odyssey that is listening to this album.
Seriously, this record is like a surreal auditory labyrinth. Both discs (it's a double album - naturally) open with vaguely parallel introductory hymns, with the Silver CD (the discs are not numbered - that would be too easy) opting for an entirely instrumental, synth-based gate into the maze, while the Copper CD samples Jarboe at her creepily childlike best before the lead-in to the synth line. She sounds for all the world like a disembodied voice wafting down from the attic as she babbles nonsensically about "the filthy premise of your terrible innocence," before the ambience envelops you.
Both CDs also feature lengthy post-rock epics early on their tracklists, with the Copper CD jumping straight to the primal major-chord euphoria of The Sound, while the Silver CD takes a lengthy detour into the blind emptiness of I Was A Prisoner In Your Skull before the repenting confessions of Helpless Child take over. I Was A Prisoner In Your Skull also gives us the first taste of what is easily Soundtracks For The Blind's most disturbing element: the samples.
The Silver CD's samples seem largely preoccupied with health and death, with the uncomfortably awkward rant of I Was A Prisoner In Your Skull giving us a glimpse into the mind of a man so determined to tell us how "fucked up" a nameless third party is that he himself seems to rank fairly low on the sanity scale after a good three minutes, and a pair of senior citizens describe their woes in How They Suffer. A child chants blissfully on The Beautiful Days, unaware of the dank sickness welling up behind her.
The Copper CD speaks more to femininity and the exploitation thereof, with a befuddled father detailing his concerns for a teenage daughter in Her Mouth Is Filled With Honey, while Minus Something features a phone sex worker who sounds at the end of her rope. Where the hell did Swans get all these samples, anyway? I can't seriously imagine a source for any of these that didn't involve some particularly soul-destroying research.
The Copper CD is looser, dreamier and less defined, but no less excellent. It's above-noted femininity is underscored by having Jarboe appear more frequently than on the other CD. A very early Swans number, Your Property, is given new dimensions of disgust by Jarboe, as well as more studied and mature instrumentation by the ever-diligent backing band. The Sound's lyrics are a pleading prayer to the protagonist's mother, while the absolutely blood-curdlingly terrifying Hypogirl proves that Swans could be just as effective without samples and technological trickery; Jarboe on her own can scare the wits out of you. Fan's Lament and Blood Section offer yet more elements to Soundtracks with their straightforwardness, while Secret Friends yields more gentle touches.
As disparate as the elements composing the album are, none of them ever feel out of place or unnecessary; all the tracks contribute to a whole that does not need to be understood in any literal sense, because it can be felt. Soundtracks For The Blind is the perfect name for it, really, as it doesn't tell a story so much as it fills out some weighty, intangible object, something earthy and glistening and disgusting and endlessly fascinating.
Never before I heard it and never since have I felt so much like I could truly disappear into an album. It's so carefully constructed and yet it seems so effortless and instinctive; Swans made it look easy to be as divergent and unique as they were, while all along keeping me in awe of them. Soundtracks For The Blind, to me, is music in its purest form, primal and unadulterated... or perhaps 'unadulterated' is the wrong word, because it was their indulgence in adulteration, spoilage and corruption that made them so great. By plumbing the depths, they kept themselves above and beyond any other band that has graced my ears to this day, and in keeping with this contradictory nature, they crafted, with Soundtracks For The Blind, a record of perfect music without really 'writing' any songs, in the traditional sense of the word.
Soundtracks For The Blind is music beyond music. It's indescribably powerful sound, intricately cultivated and carved to the shape of your ear and brain over a career of brilliant experimentation that, in retrospect, seems to have existed solely to bring humanity this album. It sounds like everything and nothing that came before it, it has not been equalled since, and even if it ever will be, it will never be forgotten. At least not by me.
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