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Devendra Banhart | OH ME OH MY... | Review
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BUST | Jillian SteinbergerLike a modernist fireside minstrelthis odd singer/songwriter sings fragile,eerie, almost-whispered songs stripped down to thier essentials. Its just Devendra and his acoustic guitar - looking like a cross between Tiny Tim and Vincent Gallo and sounding exactly like 60's folkie Karen Dalton-making the music with occasional foot stomping or hand claps for percussion.The effect however,is huge, His psych-folk lyrics are intimate,elemntal,and close-up,like looking at a leaf, but not seeing its outline, just its texture and the pale veains running through it. The album goes on and on, almost as if it wete one long song with little parts.It may be suprising to learn that Banhart is the protege of Michael Gira from the Swans because unlike his mentor, Devendra is quite a bit more tuneful and a whole lot more subtle.This is a tremendous album....
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Angels of Light | Review | Everything is Good Here
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Andrew Male**** = (Splendid!The best of its kind) Third studio album from Michael Giras post Swans collective. With 1986's Holy Money, Swans found their purpose. Following four years of visceral reports from lifes stinking gutter, allied to an oppressive, puonding, galley-slave soundtrack, Swans started incorporating elements of US gospel and country, edging towards some kind of ugly, elegiac soul music. The Swans project foundered with a move to Universal in 1989 but 10 years later, Gira returned to these cavernous shadows of american myth with Angels of Light.Everything is Good.... would appear to be the best effort yet, skeletal bluegrass ballads of dust,blood,teeth,death,and love,layered with febrile piano,brute hammerings,insect drones,childrens choirs, accordion, dulcimer,and hideous man-monkey wails from some fetid island of lost souls. Eerie,relentless,as beautifull as a rainbow in a crackpipe. Everything is good... showcases the kind of subterranean folk we might hear bleeding from stormdrains in the post-apocalyptic future....
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Everything Is Good Here/Please Come Home
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CITY PAGES, VOL 24 #1162 | by Yancey StricklerTender, gorgeous, and accessibleThe Angels of Light are everything Michael Gira didn't want his noise band Swans to be: tender, gorgeous, and accessible. Swans' dirges moved with the speed and gravity of tectonic plates, the lyrics recalling the spite of Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street" without the backhanded charm. The Angels of Light sweeten the sour with a largely acoustic, folk-rock sound. But with singer-guitarist Gira's molasses-over-sandpaper growl and steady grimace featured prominently, he's still clinging to the shadows. The third Angels of Light release, Everything Is Good Here/Please Come Home is the best disc yet in Gira's enormous catalog. The album begins with "Palisades," a cascading ode to the steep New Jersey precipices that greet upper Manhattan. "Crossing the river/That leads to the cliffs," Gira croons, coloring his throaty timbre with a boyish innocence. Yet two songs later, he plunges back into the bucolic: The soft guitars of "Kosinski" jangle tentatively while strings ease in and out like deep breaths. Imagine John Cale swapping his viola for a fiddle and you're close to the track's hillbilly hum. True to Gira's gloomy disposition, the album's prettiest cut, "What You Were," is an......
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Lisa Germano | Interview
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Resonance Magazine | Andrew Monko When you confront stuff you get rid of your anger. 2003Lullaby for Liquid Pig One of the “Teen Creed” tenets on a plaque that my parents nailed to my bedroom wall as a youngster read: “Stand for something or you’ll fall for anything.” Singer/songwriter Lisa Germano knows a thing or two about confrontation, and debates (calmly) whether a Joe Pesci modus operandi is necessarily naught. How do you react to confrontation? I actually like it because it gets things done. I spent a lot of years not being confrontational, and I think that when you’re like that you hold a lot of anxiety and anger and it makes you sick. I think that confrontation is facing a foe or something you don’t agree with, and being confrontational means you’re essentially a hot head. But maybe that’s not even bad. It means you’re really direct. I got fired once, actually twice, for being confrontational, in the music business. But what I learned was that I didn’t do anything wrong. But I didn’t really care. You have to be prepared for the risk that you take. In everyday life, when is confrontation justified? It depends if something happens......
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Angels of Light | Everything is Good Here
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CMJ New Music Monthly | Phillip SherburneGira has achieved his widest emotional range yetThe title of the third album from M. Gira's Angels Of Light rings with uncharacteristic optimism, even wrapped, as it is, within a shell of desperation. Who would have expected Gira, who fronted the notoriously gloomy Swans throughout the 1980s and '90s to express something as upbeat as "Everything is good here"? After two previous Angels Of Light records full of surging despair, Gira has achieved his widest emotional range yet, from worshipful bliss to seething rage to caved-in submission. Thanks to his arrangements of organs, acoustic guitars rippling percussion, sourceless drones and of course his own weatherbeaten growl, it's also one of his most brutally, apocalyptically beautiful albums ever. Listening to Everything is a bit like trying to stare down the sun, and the colors that explode in the blindness are more vivid than anything seen by the naked eye. A consummate storyteller, Gira weaves a tale with every song, and no matter how well worn the themes - love, power, abandonment - he brings each one to life anew with hidden signs that burron into your mind and wait to release their secret. Musically, Gira's......