Swans – Birthing

This release is a bit dissatisfying. Two of the three records in my copy are warped, and the b-side of LP2 has a long stretch of repeating pops (possibly caused by a nasty-looking scratch on the vinyl). I really wish Swans would go back to whichever pressing plant they used to use. Even the recent Angels of Light reissues were vastly inferior to the original pressings.

first two disks are warped and dished. haven't inspected third yet. plays fine but annoying. no notes on the music.

my copy of this is fucked up. damaged center label on LP1, edges aren’t trimmed and have sharp spots, came with tons of dirt, a glitch on LP1 B-side, and these are definitely not 180g. great album, but disappointed in how my record arrived

honestly thought at first they just forgot to include the dvd

Why couldn't they have just made this a triple digipak rather than stick the dvd in the crevice underneath the 2nd disc?

Having listened to this album once, I can only offer my first impression, but I would say this sits up there happily with the trilogy quality wise. The sound sits somewhere between the trilogy and Leaving Meaning/The Beggar with Gira’s acoustic guitar ages being quite prominent in parts, (which reminds me of some of the gentler moments of recent albums) only to build to an explosive climax reminiscent of the trilogy.

Having heard a few of these songs on their recent live album Live Rope, it’s hard to look at the studio versions through a new lens (Birthing, Rope, Away) but they do still remain strong as studio tracks. Among the new tracks “The Merge” definitely stands out from a first listen. Definitely one of the grooviest bass riffs I’ve heard from them in recent memory. (A Little God In My Hands, Hanging Man vibes)

The DVD is a nice extra, consisting of an almost hour long Gira solo concert, which implements some arthouse film elements. (The opening song “The Parasite” is intercut with footage of what I assume to be real parasites) With the longer being a performance of the nearly 90 minute Rope/The Beggar that incorporates video footage from various concerts. The DVD quality is very compressed across the board and I do wish that these extras were issued on a high def disc or even a thumb drive like the full version of Live Rope.

As far as the pressing goes, absolutely zero complaints from me. I was keeping an open mind after the quality control for “The Beggar” seemed to take a massive dip, with my copy from Young God arriving quite dirty and suffering from numerous ticks and pops even after being cleaned multiple times.

I cleaned this record before listening and it played through beautifully, great dynamics when played loud, as all swans albums should be:)

As a side note, the songs on the vinyl version of this album do appear in a slightly edited form. I checked the runtimes against streaming and a few of them do run a couple of minutes short.