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Angels of Light | Live | Preview
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The Austin Chronicle | Michael Chamy...the Angels have stepped into the Light...Once, nothing less than a jackhammer would bear such damaging blasts as "Raping a Slave" or "Cop." Now, the weight of Michael Gira's dour compositions rests on the gentle thread of a dulcimer or glockenspiel. The Swans are history, and the Angels have stepped into the Light - exploring the tender, albeit no less dreary, aspect of the Swans canon - with How I Loved You, the Angels' enchanting second offering. Building Gira's gentle nest of rhythm is local veteran Thor Harris, most recently known for his work with Shearwater, and an Angel for a couple of years now after meeting Gira on the heels of a particularly effective fan letter…...
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Angels of Light | Live | Preview
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PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER | HELEN H. THOMPSON...acoustic guitars, ukuleles and dulcimers...It's hard to not draw immediate parallels between Michael Gira and Nick Cave. Both are at once obscure and larger than life. Both are veterans of intellectual post-punk machinations - Gira from the Swans and Cave from The Birthday Party. Both chronically reinvent themselves and have gone through incarnations as poets, spoken-word artists and solo performers. But oddly, Gira doesn't seem to have the same kind of name recognition that Cave does, and he should: If anyone could be cited as the inventor of Horror Rock, it's Gira. His toddler-aged project Angels of Light, throws up a lovely identity crisis. Surely something so nominally delicate isn't the brainchild of he whose violent arabesque was the soul of Swans. But like actual Swans, the beauty of Angels belies their volatile temper; cherubs these are not. So while Gira now weaves his musical tapestries with acoustic guitars, ukuleles and dulcimers, he's still every bit as grim and tortured. The latest Angels of Light release, How I Loved You, is a study in the emotion in all its manifestations, even the most violent. It's safe to say that Gira's brand of black humor......
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Angels of Light | Live | Preview
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PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER | HELEN H. THOMPSON...acoustic guitars, ukuleles and dulcimers...It's hard to not draw immediate parallels between Michael Gira and Nick Cave. Both are at once obscure and larger than life. Both are veterans of intellectual post-punk machinations - Gira from the Swans and Cave from The Birthday Party. Both chronically reinvent themselves and have gone through incarnations as poets, spoken-word artists and solo performers. But oddly, Gira doesn't seem to have the same kind of name recognition that Cave does, and he should: If anyone could be cited as the inventor of Horror Rock, it's Gira. His toddler-aged project Angels of Light, throws up a lovely identity crisis. Surely something so nominally delicate isn't the brainchild of he whose violent arabesque was the soul of Swans. But like actual Swans, the beauty of Angels belies their volatile temper; cherubs these are not. So while Gira now weaves his musical tapestries with acoustic guitars, ukuleles and dulcimers, he's still every bit as grim and tortured. The latest Angels of Light release, How I Loved You, is a study in the emotion in all its manifestations, even the most violent. It's safe to say that Gira's brand of black humor......
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Angels of Light | Live | Preview
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PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER | JORDAN WEEKSTOUCHED BY AN ANGELSince the official 1997 disbanding of Swans, the group that Michael Gira began some 20 years ago in New York's post-No Wave wake of sonic fertility, Gira has been busy with solo and other group projects, including Body Lovers and Body Haters. His most recent group project is Angels of Light, and he and his angels are hitting Pittsburgh this Friday. New Mother, the Angels' first album, was a collection of slow, hypnotizing, acoustic-based songs drizzled with Gira's disarming baritione and signature self-depracating and self-evaluating lyrics, released a couple of years ago on Gira's own Young God Records label. (Gira runs not only the record label but also the exemplary Young God website, www.younggodrecords.com.) Their second album, How I Loved You, is equally hypnotizing, with sometimes-dense, sometimes-minimal instrumentation supporting emotionally raw, mostly easy-paced songs addressing love, life and purity. "I really noticed after the fact these songs were love songs for the most part," says Gira via email (from New York City) of the new Angels material. "Usually I write outwards from my personal predilections or obsessions at the time, so that's how it came out. I guess a few different women,......
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M. Gira | Solo Recordings at Home | Review
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All Music Guide | Ned RaggettGira had discussed the idea of releasing a stripped-down release for some time......before the appearance of Solo Recordings at Home, and, as with most things he put his mind to, the end results easily justified the wait. While his later work in Swans and the Angels of Light had incorporated more acoustic efforts, usually as part of song arrangements, Solo Recordings squarely places the emphasis on Gira's voice and guitar only, captured at home via one microphone (an exception being the roughly recorded concert effort "Irish Queen"). Given the sheer emotional resonance of his lyrics -- a number of his efforts here, like the slow, loping "Surrogate" or "On the Mountain," are among his bluntest ever -- the nature of the performances is astonishingly direct as a result. In keeping with his post-Swans work, though, Gira's singing balances command with empathy, cracked and tender at once; anyone not taken with his late-'90s singing won't be convinced here, though fans will find it addictive. His guitar playing similarly can shift on a dime from sudden, brusque runs to gentler, steady fingerpicking, evoking everything from strung out rural blues to Nick Drake's hushed emptiness while still sounding......