Children of God, one of the band's strongest releases, established Gira as an Old Testament tyrant obsessed with the nature of love, human frailty, and the midnight beauty of black orchids. Much of Swans' earliest work on Filth and Young God found the band fixating on single beats in a brutally sweeping, industrial cacophony, in many ways the realization of the theories of the Futurists. Later, with the addition of Jarboe, Gira brought more varied sounds into the mix, melding hooks and spatial variation to the unwavering rhythms. Children of God stands as a solid example of this transition: the maniacally heavy drone of the album's opener, "New Mind" gives way to the fragility of Jarboe's "In My Garden". This is one of a dozen wonderful juxtapositions here; in its expansiveness, Children of God brings to mind disparate touchstones: Joy Division's factory-worker melancholy, more elaborately atmospheric Black Metal bands like Emperor who deal in swirling beauty and intensity, Big Black for pure aggression, and old-time softness of traditional folk.

On Children of God, Gira's brief lyrical declarations have also begun to evolve into a larger sense of storytelling (he in fact published a hypnotic collection of Gothic short tales, The Consumer, on Henry Rollins' imprint 2.13.61 in 1996). On later recordings like The Burning World (1988), the details of the prose equaled the atmosphere evoked within the music.

World of Skin is less accomplished, its quiet introspection lacks the maniacal propulsiveness of Swans. On the plus side, tracks like "Breathing Water" and "One Small Sacrifice" anticipate Gira's later work with Angels of Light, albeit in a more skeletal, funereal form. Here, though, Jarboe's vocalizing often errs on the side of the new age: her interpretation of "Cry Me a River" is static (to be fair, Gira's remake of "I Want To Be Your Dog" is equally ho-hum) and "We'll Fall Apart" sounds like the precursor to some hopelessly lightweight Sarah McLaughlin's malaise. On the other hand, "Blood on Your Hands" is a lovely dark-night spiritual harmonized by Jarboe and other singers. This track also shows up on The Swans Are Dead, a mind-blowing documentation of their final world tours of 1995 and 1997. Live, it grows into a sinister solo alto with a slight drone humming and other ambient noise in the background.

Despite the misfires on World of Skin, to experience these carefully paired documents as a singularity is an intense study in contrasts and linkages as well as a compelling look at a particularly fruitful moment in the development of one of America's more ecstatically uncompromising, idiosyncratic, and sadly overlooked composers.(Brandon Stousy, Pitchfork.com)