PRESS
Angels of Light | Live | Preview
L.A. Weekly | John Payne
shaky promises of redemption
Michael Gira's Angels of Light, Devendra Banhart, W.A.C.O. at Spaceland. This Young God Records showcase features that valuable label's founder Michael Gira and one of his most important discoveries, Devendra Banhart. Gira you do or don't know from his work with the essential Swans of '70s-'80s vintage, the extraordinarily threatening and LOUD/redefining-heavy re-tuned guitar avalanche that held major influence on Sonic Youth and any number of black-density white-heat guitar-as-orchestral monstrosities to follow. The L.A. native Gira's Angels of Light project showcases his more variegated interests and approaches, allowing his nascent dark-folk-laced songs and interest in far-reaching instrumental settings to come to the fore. The recent Everything Is Good Here/Please Come Home is just a great, great collection of profoundly personal observations - on doom and indifference, sticking pins in the mind's eye, people come and gone, shaky promises of redemption and memories distorted and re-imagined by drugs - artfully conceived in perpetually surprising acoustic and electric landscapes. Gira's got an ear for unusual talent as well, and his label has issued Devendra Banhart's hissy-vérité Oh Me Oh My ... (rest of extremely long title available upon request). Banhart will sit and not just strum his guitar, he'll finesse an intricate weave of fluttering spider webs as he warbles and twitters and twines his eerie daydreams about things that matter to him and upon which you're invited to eavesdrop.