Although Michael Gira has let it be known that the most recent Swans tour was the last in the current iteration of this veteran 36-year-old project, there seem to be no corresponding closure plans for Gira’s parallel career as a solo artist. Indeed, Gira seems to regard solo performance as some kind of workshop for Swans, with many songs initially given solo outings eventually winding up in fully-fledged form as Swans efforts. This has the unfortunate effect of making a Michael Gira solo concert feel like listening to a series of demos, with all the sketchy and provisional qualities that implies.

In fact, out of the eleven or so songs played by Gira at his Geneva concert in February, I reckon only four were actually new, with the others hailing from various stages of the Gira/Swans/Angels of Light back catalogue. But the familiarity (to this long-time Gira-watcher, at least) of those seven old songs was never enough to bring this concert above the level of the formulaic. This was essentially long-form busking, with Gira’s rudimentary guitar laying the foundation for a series of hectoring, haranguing outbursts that put me in mind of my occasional Sunday afternoon visits to Speaker’s Corner at Hyde Park in the early 1990s.

Bereft of kindness, warmth and sensitivity, Gira’s stentorian bellow is not an easy thing to love, and the downer hearing it at length put me on during this concert was only exacerbated by the increasingly turgid and overblown nature of Gira’s texts. Gira’s lyrics tend towards the sulphurous and messianic, with a limited schema of lyrical tropes that rely heavily on reach-me-down apocalyptic imagery. Governed by grindingly repetitive chord structures, delivered in tones that range from the meekly defeated to the perpetually outraged, these songs lurch onwards and ultimately collapse under the weight of their own absurdity.

The new songs Gira gave us a taste of in Geneva were more than enough to confirm my feeling that the Swans project has reached a creative dead end. “Are We Sleeping?” was a progressively glib list of bilious observations, “The Hanging Man” relied on a spat-out “NOT” for effect like some cheapjack horror flick, while “You Will Pay” (I make no claims as to the accuracy of these song titles, by the way) was only put out of its misery after a long, rancorous spoken-word outro. It was a blessed relief, then, to have this concert end with the piercingly sad and deeply moving “God Damn The Sun”, a song that has haunted me for almost 30 years and a rare instance of Gira letting the song breathe and tell its own story, rather than being locked up in grotesque contortions of its own making.