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Angels of Light Sing Other People | Review
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Musicemissions.com | Mike Woodone of the two of three artists in music today who are almost guaranteed to produce brilliant work every time4/18/2005 Sooner or later, any review of a M. Gira record is bound to use the word "gorgeous". Since co-founding and then splitting up the seminal Swans, which pushed the extremities of word and sound, he has gone for a softer approach, weaving semi-acoustic sound-scapes that feel like found songs from someone's attic. His work with Angels of Light, Body Haters, and Body Lovers (he is nothing if not willing to explore all degrees of emotion, Gira has constructed beautiful little missives from the outer reaches of experience. That his work has gotten lighter, in the sense of more hopeful, is a testament that his constant searching is having results. In fact, Sing 'Other People'could almost be a pop record, at least in his catalogue. Brittle, sparce tracks like "The Kid is Already Breaking" and "On The Mountain" feel like observations written on the fly while spying on a stranger; others, like "Michael's White Hands" and "Destroyer", wrestle with personal demons. There is even a sort of children's song, "Purple Creek", which is, yes, gorgeous, though I would......
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Angels Of Light Sing Other People | Review
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Agouti Music | Eli Ellsworth...the whole damn album soars with excellenceAugust 7/05 The Angels Of Light Sing Other People Just like Tom Waits, ex-SWANS frontman Michael Gira has not only matured with age but increasingly grown as an artist in the latter part of his career. This is Gira’s fourth album with The Angels of Light and a welcomed expansion to more-delicate country-tinged freak-folk indie music. There is an omnipresent lamenting associated with The Angels of Light, a kind of introspective heavy-spirited gloominess that encompasses with ethereal splendor. Genuine emotion and quiet repose are prominent, with instances of lively rejoice occasionally filtering through. There’s such a spellbinding organic sound on this record. Acoustic nylon string and slide steel guitars, fragile piano, violins and cellos, sparse percussion, spine-tingling tortured moans and groans, yelps, drawn-out harmony, and Gira’s breathy baritone are intelligently and bewitchingly combined, creating a wonderful extrasensory escape from a weary world. Indispensible selections include "Michael's White Hands," "Purple Creek," "My Sister Said," "Jackie's Spine" and "Simon Is Stronger Than Us." Honestly, the whole damn album soars with excellence. This is razor-sharp acoustic intensity that continually inspires a blossoming appreciation for freak-folk experimentation. I just wonder how they're going to......
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Interview | Michael Gira
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Tucson Weekly |Gene Armstrong"The important thing to me about being a small label is being able to work with really honest and good people...."PUBLISHED ON MAY 5, 2005: Angels and Family Michael Gira hits the road with his new, less-aggressive act--and a new musical discovery, too The Angels of Light Singer-songwriter Michael Gira sits in a motel room in South Dakota gazing out the window at a strip mall. He's on the phone, explaining why he doesn't really enjoy interviews with music journalists. To be fair, though, it's a topic I brought up. "Well, to be honest, (being interviewed) is one of my least favorite things to do. It's not because it's intrusive or offensive. I know it's necessary (to fully interest) people in the music, so they can more directly and fully listen to it." But interviews just feel kind of redundant to making music, the act of listening to music and the meanings contained in music, he says. "Lately, I have been listening to John Wesley Harding by Bob Dylan a lot," Gira says. "I have been listening to that album for years, since it came out, when I was something like 13 or so, and I never......
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Akron/Family
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The Deli Magazine, NYC | by Lev GlebovichAkron/Family are after something far more ambitious and interesting than mere blissed-out strumfestsJune-July/05 "There is so much "stuff" in this music that the listener is left to suss out the essence for himself: where one is inclined to hear early Pink Floyd, someone else will find an avant- garde noise record leavened with melody. Some beats wouldn't be out of place on country radio. All in all, it's as un-New York as you can get." Akron/Family is the last band one would expect to get popular. Its name is incomprehensible; the guys are not even from Akron. The Family's four members, all prodigiously bearded and remarkably good-natured, would look most at home kicking a hacky sack around a grassy knoll of a Midwestern campus. No Sean McCabe artwork for these guys: far from consciously rejecting the trend-storms roiling the New York music community, Akron/Family create the impression of simply not being aware of them. On their dutifully updated MySpace page, the band claims that its music sounds like, direct quote, "gack bun jam a tree", and that's about right. Officially, the Family's sonic soup falls under the vague description of "psych-folk," which is......
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Interview | Michael Gira
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Pitchforkmedia.com | Michael IdovWe talked to Michael Gira about the continuing maturation of one of rock's prickliest minds. It's been almost a decade since Michael Gira dissolved the fearsome Swans and embarked on a figuratively and literally quiet tenure as the leader of an amorphous assemblage called the Angels of Light. Gira's first band aimed to confront the world's evils by enumerating them over deafening funnels of gothic (not goth) noise; his second transfers the struggle to a place of strange, hushed beauty. Even so, the Angels' latest album, The Angels of Light Sing 'Other People', is a shockingly extroverted affair: not only does Gira enlist his Young God Records' signees Akron/Family as the backing band-- resulting in some of the mellowest jangle in his discography—but the LP itself is an honest-to-god cycle of song portraits. We talked to Michael Gira about the continuing maturation of one of rock's prickliest minds. Pitchfork: Swans songs were often about space-- not lyrically, of course, but they seemed to take up huge swaths of headphone space: cavernous reverb, enormous drums, multilayered guitars and vocals. The Angels of Light sound much "smaller"-- intimate and upfront-- and especially so on the new album. What prompted......