The Miraculous is as beautiful as it is terrifying. It’s a towering gothic church that you can see from miles around. It marches to the beat of war drums, always forward at a glacial pace engulfing everything that stands in its way. A blizzard made of droning guitars and a nine thousand pipe organ. You inhabit the sounds as much as listen to them, completely snow blind and with no sense of direction. Then suddenly, Anna von Hausswolff’s mighty voice emerges to guide you home.

Her voice is perhaps the album’s most powerful asset, despite presumably containing fewer than nine thousand pipes. At the end of the album’s epic centrepiece ‘Come Wander With Me/Deliverance’ von Hausswolff duels with a “horns-in-the-air” guitar solo and comes out on top. The infamous organ in contrast is something of a let-down. It acts more as an atmospheric giving the whole album a frosty ambience, but when it is pushed to the forefront it never provides the raw power that von Hausswolff’s voice or the guitars have.

The Miraculous is in many ways reminiscent of the albums Swans released in the 90s, drawing on the same combination of the sweeping and the ambient, the over blown and grandiose, the simple and folky. It also shares Swans’ fascination and re-contextualisation of religious motifs, though von Hausswolff’s interest seems more reverential and less transgressive than Michael Gira’s. Everything from the organ, to the lyrics, to its metal influence evoke religion. And as with those Swans albums, if you get on board with what von Hausswolf is doing, it’s incredibly effective stuff. If you can’t get on board it can come across as melodramatic and well… a bit silly.

Daoud Al-Janabi