Jarboe’s metal bona fides are well in order. Since the original dissolution of Swans fifteen years ago, this avant-goth noisemaker has boasted an impressive number of collaborations across extreme music’s fertile underbelly: album-length statements with Byla, Neurosis, and Justin K. Broadrick; solo work of her own featuring luminaries such as Steve Von Till, Kris Force, Blixa Bargeld, Phil Anselmo, and Attila Csihar; and guest vocal spots for Morne, A Storm Of Light, The Austrasian Goat, and, perhaps most thrillingly for the Swans-besotted among us, Cobalt, on whose song “Pregnant Insect” Jarboe lifts a section from Swans’s “Mother/Father” – that’s our woman coming in around the 3:30 mark to puke her guts out about “fucccccckiiiing destruuuuuuctioooooon!”
Here at Reverse Polarity, however, our mission is to convince you, the bloodthirsty and clamoring metal hordes, to find the extremity in the superficially un-extreme. To that end, perhaps I could be so bold as to suggest that, despite the manic intensity of many of Jarboe’s metallically-leaning divagations, no complete document of hers is as roundly extreme as the 1998 solo album Anhedoniac.
For the most part, however, Anhedoniac‘s extremity is subtle, at least in its sound. The title track that introduces the album rides a single decayed-sounding organ riff the entire time, while Jarboe displays her finest skill: a wide range of distinct voices and nuanced inflections. Her voice moves from a husky low thrum to a witchy sneer, and from a sex-dripping leer to a frightened child, spinning stark images of unease: “Oh belly aching, my hole is full / Of fishes a eatin’ up to my skull / Then slit my wrists to go to sleep, / And lick this fungus to give me dreams.”
The abrupt transition into “The Cage,” with its stuttering deep drone and backwards-sounding drum loop completes a perfect opening pair, and while the song’s sole lyric – “I want to fuck your soul…fuck your soul…fuck your soul…” – is rather wanting in the sophistication department, the layered delivery and incessant repetition create a fevered mantra of lust and control.
Jarboe’s lyrics are almost always arresting even as they are alternately simple and lurid. At their best, her words carry more than a hint of the American South of Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner – decadent, repressed, tragicomic; genteel yet grotesque. On “Mississippi,” Jarboe puts on a heavily affected slow drawl, spat gutturally from the corner of the mouth: “Daddy said t’were thunder shook the rockin’ porch / But Mammy said t’were Daddy’s gun sure made them colors nice.” Jarboe’s astonishing talent for misusing her vocal chords is made startlingly manifest on “Not Noah’s Ark,” which is headed in the album’s booklet with this bald description of what such an Ark might actually mean: “Every species of the earth squeezed together alive and writhing, devouring and copulating in a collective wail of blood, defecation, and flying ripped skin, enclosed in a colossal glass box.” The song itself is four minutes of Jarboe imitating the noises of goats, feral cats, pigs, and all other manner of creatures locked in just such a cataclysmic dervish of carnality. Here more than elsewhere, the nature of Jarboe’s extremity is laid bare: she doesn’t sing about characters, she becomes them, and not just in voice, but in body.
Throughout their time in Swans and beyond, both Jarboe and Michael Gira have seemed preternaturally obsessed with a raw, intimate, sensual yet uncomfortable axis of themes: vulnerability, dependence, submission, domination, seduction, repulsion, mastery, and obedience. While Gira can strip himself naked and subvert his howls of social and sexual domineering with an equally untamed vein of somewhat self-deprecating submission, Jarboe takes the tropes and imagery of submission even farther, which makes the accompanying reversals into cruel warrior witch queen all the more effective. The Anhedoniac booklet features graphic photos of Jarboe, as partially seen on the cover. She is in a dark room with bars on the window. Her face, breasts, and inner thighs are done up with realistic-looking makeup that suggests open wounds, lash marks, rope cuts. She wears nothing but a savage-looking chastity belt made of rough leather and metal studs, adorned with fishhooks. The first two pages of the inner booklet feature a discomfiting close-up of her labia pulled rudely through a metal ring; the opposite page reads: “This album is dedicated to all former members of Swans. 1982-1997. For Michael R. Gira. I will always remember. I will always love you.”
The willful submission and self-debasement that runs so thick throughout the album cannot be ignored. A bit of found sound speech on “Under Will” relates that “It’s actually a strength…to be willing to be vulnerable.” And yet, even in this most seemingly naked display of constant self-abnegation, there is an electric feminism at play. Jarboe embraces these moments of the master-slave dialectic so completely that it appears entirely guileless. This is not a put-on. And thus, if this willingness to disappear into the self of an other is no put-on, then neither are the moments of total self-annunciation and fierce reclamation of complete mastery. Even in the richest honey of her delivery throughout Anhedoniac‘s many calmer moments, there is always the implied threat of violence: physical, sexual, psychic. This simmering tension between beauty and ugliness, dominated and dominating, finds its clearest expression in album closer “I’m a Killer.”
Here she sings “Come now anoint, I lick your angry fist / I love your touch / I pray here everyday, yeah come and suck,” but there she sings “I kill your lover / I pray here every night / Come in and feel my bite and now infuse my hate.” Over and over and over she rips her throat in overlapping fury and sultry surrender: “I’m a killer, I’m a killer, I’m a killer.” It’s a hideous and massively uncomfortable way to close an album, and thus also becomes the album’s most honest moment.
Jarboe’s work stands so sturdily on its own that one shouldn’t have to rehash the Swans connection every time, but concluding a solo album from 1998 by bellowing “I’m a killer” repeatedly can’t help but remind the canny listener of the following Jarboe highlight from Swans’s final pre-reformation album, 1997’s Soundtracks for the Blind.
Anhedoniac subtracts the full-band bluster, but retains every ounce of the menace. Heavy fucking metal, friends.
