Helpless Child

Helpless Child

Swans

Regarded as many as the best song of all SWANS catalogue, and by some as the greatest Post-Rock song of all time, Helpless Child is the longest and most famous track of the album Soundtracks For The Blind, and also one of the most famous songs of all the band discography, together to Blind and Screenshot.

Helpless Child is the first of the tetralogy of Post-Rock epics from the album, a very lethargic and atmospheric song, being known for its surrealistic, cinematic, depressive and oppressive soundscapes and progression. The most remembered section are the last 5 minutes, composed of a lethargic and massive Shoegaze structure, that keeps continuously building non-stop, with each time more and more instruments being added, until the song simply collapses over itself and stop suddenly at the end, without any kind of satisfactory conclusion.

The song probably is from the point of view of a fetus inside a junkie mother’s womb, that has it’s gestation destroyed by drug and alcohol use. The building at the end can represent the gestation itself, and the song collapsing can symbolize a miscarriage. The song was inspired by the band’s front man Michael Gira life, more specifically, his relationship with his absent and alcoholic mother Alice Shulte.