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ANGELS OF LIGHT | Everything Is Good Here | Review
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Creative Loafing | J. EDWARD KEYES riveting from start to finish For the better part of the '80s and '90s, Michael Gira was one of two principle personas (Jarboe was the other) behind the Swans, the New York/Atlanta noise ensemble that spent its lifespan mining the awful depths of human cruelty. He hasn't strayed too far from that path with Angels of Light. The group's fifth record is a brutal, unyielding exercise in terror and dread. Angels of Light actually do what all of those ridiculous post-grunge bands talk about doing -- namely, they punish you with sound. "All Souls' Rising" is constructed around a single merciless chord pattern that snarls and stomps for a full six minutes as Gira howls and grunts and stalks the edges of the song like a serial killer. It's like The Birthday Party, but darker. Even the ostensibly relaxed "Kosinski" builds to a fever pitch. The thing that makes the Angels' songs so dense is the fact that they are all verse. Gira is an expert in stretching a single musical idea to its breaking point, grinding out the same series of notes until he's walloped every last possibility out of them. Instead of......
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Angels of Light | Live | Preview
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L.A. Weekly | John Payneshaky promises of redemptionMichael 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......
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Devendra Banhart | Oh me oh my... | Review
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Ocio de Barcelona, #1323 | Juan M. Freire El folk primitivo y exótico......de este cantautor de San Francisco ha enamorado a los más exigentes catadores de arte outsider. Bajo la sombra de Daniel Johnston, Nick Drake o Syd Barrett, el joven Banhart ha debutado con veintidós desnudos temas para devotos de la emoción sin aditivos. Naturaleza rediviva....
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Angels of Light | video
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MP4.compreviously unreleased video clips from the 2001 tour Now available on MP4.com Rose of Los Angeles New York Girls...
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Fascinated by the Brutal & Perverse
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The New York Sun | by Martin EdlundLIVE Review from Tonic, NYC, April 2003Michael Gira might be accused of false advertising.His former band,the Swans (1982–1997) produced anything but the tranquil music implied by its name. And his current band, Angels of Light, which played Tonic Saturday and Sunday nights, dwells mostly on the themes of personal demons and darkness. His appearance is also a false advertisement. Gira dresses in a simple gray suit, his hair oiled to one side like a country farmer. His face is waxen, expressionless. But there’s no escaping his eyes. They are black pools: Shallow and penetrating, they peer into you even as they keep you out. There’s ferocity behind them. For Saturday’s show, Gira played with former Swans collaborators Christoph Hahn and Patrick Fondiller, as well as surrealist folk singer and labelmate Devendra Banhart (who also opened). All four played guitars (occasionally lap steel, electric bass, and mandolin), building up intricate musical structures that, when they worked, approached free jazz, and when it didn’t, became an unholy mess. Although Gira will be forever known as one of the pioneers of New York’s noise-rock scene in the early 1980s, his themes belong to another category: art......