WHITE LIGHT FROM THE MOUTH OF INFINITY

After the neofolk release of The Burning World marking a dramatic change from the repetitive, noisy era of Swans, Michael GIra made it abundantly clear that this was not going to be a one off left turn, as White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity is straight up gothic rock. Gone is the anger and aggression bleeding through each and every industrial note, instead being replaced with morose melodies and lush musical passages. Despite this coherence and fully realised change in tone and sound, I personally don't find this album all too enjoyable, despite it essentally being a more mature take on The Burning World, a lot of it coming down to how bored I get with this by the end, especially due to its far larger length and the fact that a lot of the songs end up feeling quite samey, none particularly harrowing and dark, nor any lighter, more purely enjoyable songs, just over an hour of depressive tunes with little variation most of the time.

Despite my immediate criticisms, the first few songs on the album seem to do evereything in their power to make these claims seem unwarranted, as they're easily some of the best cuts to be found here, be it the extremely powerful, dramatic intro to Better Than You, or Power And Sacrifice containing such sweeping, lush instrumentals, really highlighting the amazing production here. This song almost sounds as if it's being carried by the wind, especially with its galloping drum beat and the vocals in the chorus, building up to create a dense wall of sound that simply sounds incredible. You Know Nothing is a more slow paced song, but already I'm being reminded of previous tracks, as this hits so many of the same marks that Better Than You did, just slower. Song For A Dead Time stops this from becoming too problematic by having Jarboe take the lead vocals, her breathy, ethereal voice further heightening the already dense atmosphere, and the slower tempo with small additions of flute and strings create a great soundscape. Love Will Save You is the last song on the album that I really like. The lyrics here are some of the only ones that interest me on the album, the dark tone contrasting amazingly with the lyrics talking about how much love can get you through hard times, while also blinding you to your problems. The song just has a certain poetic quality to it that I adore, and while I won't claim it as particularly deep or genius, I still do love this song and its repetition of "love will save you".

While Failure is generally considered a higher point on the album, I personally consider it to be borderline comical, easily the most sombre song here, but I still find many aspects of it to be ridiculous, especially how most lines end with a more and more long winded way of describing failure as a crushing force that can be hard to overcome. While this starts off as an interesting motif, it rapidly becomes quite old. After this point I personally don't find too much to be interesting, just more melancholy songs with admittedly great production that brings a strong ethereal quality to them, giving the album some very strong positives despite how it can get pretty boring.

Overall, my main problem with the album comes down to how similar many of the tracks sound to one another in tone and even melody. The length of the album doesn't help this much at all either, as it approaches the point where even an album I loved would start to feel like it should approach its end, never mind one that I've been fairly bored with for a while. I can't really fault the core sound of the album, nor the direction that Gira went down here, it's just that the execution is flawed and the album on the whole is dull, especially due to lack of variety.

Best tracks: Better Than You, Power and Sacrifice, Love Will Save You

Weakest tracks: Failure, Song For The Sun, When She Breathes

Verdict: I appear to be in the minority when expressing my opinions on this album, but try as I might, I just cannot get into it, each repeated listen taking away more and more of the appeal, rather than growing on me, as while repeated listens better help me to analyse the many layers of instrumentals in each song, I find that it ends up just sounding like the same few songs played again and again, even if they do have some merit.