The Wire

Lead Review

August 07


Soundcheck - This month's selected CDs and vinyl


The fifth album by Michael Gira's Angels Of Light achieves its
mythical depth and range with trance-fuelled abandon.

By Keith Moline

Angels Of Light
We Are Him
Young God CD

Michael Gira continues to suffer from having each new album, each new
fugitive direction he takes, compared with his early work, produced in
just a few short years in the early 80s. While his group Swans made
some of the slowest, heaviest and most grindingly relentless music
ever created on albums like Filth (1983) and Cop (1984), for more than
a decade of their lifespan - Gira disbanded the group in 1997 - their
work was multifaceted, sweeping and often acoustic. As for his later
work under the Angels Of Light banner, the unremitting moroseness that
Gira has often been accused of - perhaps not without justification
when you consider lines like "God damn anyone that says a kind word"
(from 1988's "God Damn The Sun") - has for the most part been replaced
by honest simplicity and generosity of spirit.

For this fifth Angels Of Light album, Gira has again recruited acid
pastoralists Akron/Family to realise his songs, which are usually
composed on acoustic guitar. Some of the musicians featured on early
releases New Mother (1999) and How I Loved You (2001) have returned to
flesh out We Are Him's arrangements. Gira has in the past bemoaned
his difficulty in resisting the temptation to obsess over sonic
details, but those who found the last couple of albums a little too
dry and sparse will surely enjoy this one's lusher textures. We Are
Him is the most widescreen Angles album to date without ever spilling
over into the production excesses of Swans; further, it retains the
freshness and immediacy that is a hallmark of Akron/Family's work.
Nothing feels superfluous; the instrumentation, though compellingly
mercurial, in never intrusive or overwrought, allowing Gira's
songwriting to command centre stage.

And a superb set of songs it is. His early work explored the
narratives opened up between each repetition of a single riff or line
of lyric, and how abjection, violence and blank nihilism could
multiply exponentially with each hammerblow drum kick or solemn
acoustic strum. The younger Gira may have been loath to admit to any
weakness - by his own account he could be a nasty piece of work - but
at the heart of all his music lay vulnerability and a longing for
transcendence. Such yearning was heightened rather than crushed by
his monolithic musical constructs.

The difference with We Are Him is that he has become adept at
expressing it all with such candour, precision and economy. Certainly
repetition still plays its part, as on the opening "Black River Song",
in which a monstrous blues riff cycles around on itself until the
album's first chord change, which arrives about ten seconds before the
song ends. But the repetition has nothing to do with bludgeoning
monomania; it's all about trance-fulled abandon and release.
Gira's words continue to conflate opposites of sin and redemption,
good and evil, hope and despair. In the past this bordered on the
gratuitous, a blunt undercutting of positive potential by sheer
boundless cynicism. But here it feels like an attempt to synthesise
something strong and true, as if they aren't opposites but mirror
images: "Black River runs, beneath the ground/Receiving the days that
feed the night/Black River flows through the belly of everyone/Fading,
growing, fading, flowing." In Gira's world, the breath of artistic
inspiration, the memory of departed friends and family,
personifications of love and cruelty, vengeful and forgiving gods, all
of these intermingle, coursing through the land, the body and even the
blood, though he is never explicit as to whether this is cause for
celebration or terror: "There is no place to run from Joseph's
truth/His hands are on your throat but feeding you" ("Joseph's Song").
If this all sounds like serious stuff, you're right. Yet there are
some sparkling pop songs on We Are Him. The title track is built on a
joyous glam rock stomp, bursting through a folk-drone intro and never
letting up, while pastel guitars open and close "The Man We Left
Behind", a waltz time confessional that crosses gossamer Byrdsian
Country rock with the offhand gravitas of Leonard Cohen. "Not
Here/Not Now" rides out on some inspired Western guitar twang and
"Sometimes I Dream I'm Hurting You" features goofy Nuggets-styles
garage rock organ, while "Sunflower's Here To Stay" even boasts a coda
that recalls The Turtles' "Happy Together" (though the title might
indicate that Gira actually had The Beach Boys in mind).
Generally, though, the mood is one of calm reflection. In the past
Gira's famed intensity has felt a bit too pat, his victories too
easily won; here, the power of a song like "Star Chaser" is heightened
by the restraint of its arrangement. It's another wrenching waltz
that recasts autobiographical detail into a kind of modern tragic
folklore. Gira has characterised himself as "the type of person that
immediately abstracts experience as it occurs" (in The Wire 233), and
it's this gift (or curse, perhaps) that imbues his work with a near
mythical depth and range. Nothing on We Are Him will startle like old
classics such as "Raping A Slave" or "A Screw", but these songs will
get under your skin (to use a recurring Gira image) and remain with
you for a long time to come.

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Yourfleshmag.com

By james jackson toth

July 07

OK, now it's time to discuss the record of the month. As a longtime Swans
fanatic, I may be biased, but this latest Angels of Light album is a
masterpiece. Michael Gira has been steadily issuing Angels of Light albums
since the mid nineties and each one gets better and better, but We Are Him
[Young God] is not only his finest achievement but also easily one of the
year's best albums. Backed by members of Akron / Family, among others, the
meticulously layered instrumentation is the perfect foil to Gira's dry,
menacing vocals. Dirges and rockers sit side by side as songs are built on
single hiccupping electric guitar lines, trippy drones, and even Akron /
Family's collective vocal prowess, used to great effect throughout.
Absolutely perfect.

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Paperthinwalls.com

http://www.paperthinwalls.com/singlefile/item?id=936


ANGELS OF LIGHT - "Black River Song"
from We Are Him (Young God)
NY Pastoral // Out August 20

At 52, well-dressed ex-Swan and Young God impresario Michael Gira is
releasing his fifth elegant Angels Of Light album, We Are Him; and it's
every bit as brilliant as 2003's epic record-to-beat Everything Is Good
Here/Please Come Home. Again backed by Akron/Family along with sundry
ex-Swans and NYC legends, "Black River Song" boils tiny squadrons of guitar
fire, percussion, brass and a Boschian mixed choir into a brimstone pulpit
from which Gira spits about the black river that soundlessly "flows through
the belly of everyone." It's a powerful opener that clips too soon. On the
album it spills into the more meditative pools of "Promise Of Water," led by
gentle shaker and Gira's forceful but lulling scowl: "When you open your
mouth/You're too stupid to scream."

Michael Gira on "Black River Song"

You organized a ton of people for the record. Who does what on this
particular track?
Seth from Akron played the weird picked clusters of electric guitars. Dana
from Akron played drums. There's actually two full takes of drums recorded
in different rooms—one with room sound, the other tight. Bill Rieflin
[Swans, Ministry, etc.] played the growling bass guitar. The fabulous
Siobhan Duffy and the marvelous Larkin Grim sang backing chick vocals. Seth,
Dana and Miles of Akron did the doo-wop vocals. Steve Moses of Alice Donut
played trombones. I played the acoustic guitar on which the song is based,
and sang my silly vocals. I think Bill played tambourines on the downbeat
too, but I can't remember for sure.

What's this black river running through us?
I was sitting on the toilet reading Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and this bit
about a subterranean black river sent me dreaming. I interpret it as meaning
the dark chocolate that we all share inside us. It's like when you were a
teenager and your make-out girlfriend stuffed a whole bar of Hershey's
chocolate in her mouth, chewed it good, then you both swilled it back and
forth as you sucked each other's faces... Like that! The shared experience
of fecund sweetness, tralala. - BRANDON STOSUY
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007