PRESS
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Akron/Family live at The Khyber | review
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Magnaphone | Stephen Boundsa mid-western hillbilly grip with avant-garde punchI don't want to get old, and I don't want to be alone. I don't go to bars too often and it's not because I don't drink; I have a half-gallon jug of Absolut vodka here at home. No, it's because the sounds and the smells and the atmosphere only remind me that someday I'm going to die, and it's probably not going to be with six beautiful young women looking after me on my private island in the tropics. I arrived at the Khyber in time to see Akron / Family, or at least that's who I was told they were. I enjoyed a strong set of music from them. They were surprising and daring; a mid-western hillbilly grip with avant-garde punch. I like that, and I like the drummer. He looks like a zealous young guy who might not cut it until you see him maintain his loss of control. Shit, I have trouble talking to telephone operators. He's a good man too. Honest and friendly, and healthy, like a man who knows his limitations even if he hadn't slept in three days. None of us were getting sleep......
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Michael Gira at Iota
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Washington Post | by Catherine P. LewisLive reviewSinger Michael Gira is best known for his band Swans, which layered dark and depressing lyrics over noisy music slowed to a crawl. After Swans broke up almost a decade ago, Gira embarked on a solo career under the name Angels of Light, and while his lyrics haven't gotten much cheerier, his music certainly has. Tuesday night at Iota, he was backed by an energetic four-piece band called Akron/Family, which preceded its Angels of Light set with a rowdy opening set of its own. Akron/Family's initial set featured all four musicians singing together on almost every song, often as in tune as a fraternity on a drunken night. The band's raucousness was more subdued behind Gira: The backing vocals offset the harshness of his voice, which bore the gruffness of Leonard Cohen's sing-speak. Together, the five musicians chanted and repeated phrases, which escalated from "hunt him down" to "kill that man" on the entrancing "My Sister Said." At times, the group's collaboration was as straightforward as a campfire singalong, as on a cover of Bob Dylan's "I Pity the Poor Immigrant." Gira still maintained an air of weirdness, as he spit out nonsense......
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Michael Gira at Iota
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Washington Post | by Catherine P. LewisLive reviewSinger Michael Gira is best known for his band Swans, which layered dark and depressing lyrics over noisy music slowed to a crawl. After Swans broke up almost a decade ago, Gira embarked on a solo career under the name Angels of Light, and while his lyrics haven't gotten much cheerier, his music certainly has. Tuesday night at Iota, he was backed by an energetic four-piece band called Akron/Family, which preceded its Angels of Light set with a rowdy opening set of its own. Akron/Family's initial set featured all four musicians singing together on almost every song, often as in tune as a fraternity on a drunken night. The band's raucousness was more subdued behind Gira: The backing vocals offset the harshness of his voice, which bore the gruffness of Leonard Cohen's sing-speak. Together, the five musicians chanted and repeated phrases, which escalated from "hunt him down" to "kill that man" on the entrancing "My Sister Said." At times, the group's collaboration was as straightforward as a campfire singalong, as on a cover of Bob Dylan's "I Pity the Poor Immigrant." Gira still maintained an air of weirdness, as he spit out nonsense......
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Michael Gira at Iota
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Washington Post | by Catherine P. LewisLive reviewSinger Michael Gira is best known for his band Swans, which layered dark and depressing lyrics over noisy music slowed to a crawl. After Swans broke up almost a decade ago, Gira embarked on a solo career under the name Angels of Light, and while his lyrics haven't gotten much cheerier, his music certainly has. Tuesday night at Iota, he was backed by an energetic four-piece band called Akron/Family, which preceded its Angels of Light set with a rowdy opening set of its own. Akron/Family's initial set featured all four musicians singing together on almost every song, often as in tune as a fraternity on a drunken night. The band's raucousness was more subdued behind Gira: The backing vocals offset the harshness of his voice, which bore the gruffness of Leonard Cohen's sing-speak. Together, the five musicians chanted and repeated phrases, which escalated from "hunt him down" to "kill that man" on the entrancing "My Sister Said." At times, the group's collaboration was as straightforward as a campfire singalong, as on a cover of Bob Dylan's "I Pity the Poor Immigrant." Gira still maintained an air of weirdness, as he spit out nonsense......
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Other People
M. Gira's Angels of Light and Akron/Family.()
Seattle Weekly | by Rod Smithshow previewLittle did Akron/Family know what lay ahead when they started sending Michael Gira demos. "If a record was anywhere in our minds, it was way in back," multi-instrumentalist Miles Seaton claims by phone from his home in Brooklyn. "Essentially, we were just looking for feedback from someone we respected. We were so immersed in what we were doing that we had absolutely no distance from our work. We needed someone to tell us that there was, in fact, sound on the discs we were making—that we weren't just hallucinating the whole thing." Less than three years after that first fateful trip to the post office, the semi-acoustic psychonauts are up to the hair on their chinny-chin-chins in Gira. Not content with co-producing a self-titled debut for his Young God label, he drafted them into Angels of Light, his main creative squeeze since the 1997 breakup of convulsive beauty-mongers Swans. Akron/Family are pulling double duty on a five-week string of live dates—opening as themselves, then returning to the stage as their enabler's kindred spirits. "Michael keeps saying that we haven't suffered enough yet," says Seaton, who moved to New York from Seattle a few years......