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Angels of Light | Everything is Good Here | Review
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THE NEW YORK PRESS | Volume 16, Issue 4 | Jim Knipfel It's always seemed that they aren't songs he's writing so much as incantations Since the Swans broke up after 1996¹s Soundtracks for the Blind, Michael Gira has remained one of the busiest men in music. His Brooklyn-based label, Young God Records, has released dozens of albums by an international collection of jazz, rock, noise, folk and experimental groups. He¹s repackaged several old Swans records, released a spoken-word album and recorded his own music with a variety of musicians and under a variety of monikers‹the Body Lovers, the Body Haters and Angels of Light. Each post-Swans bands had a different attitude. The Body Haters was pure, rabid noise. The Body Lovers was noisy too, but more refined. Of them all, Angels of Light remains the most direct descendant of the Swans, continuing along the same trajectory the Swans were following when they broke up. That is to say, the songs on this third Angels of Light album bear no resemblance whatsoever to early Swans recordings. There are tunes here, and real singing, and more traditional song structures (and all the songs come in at under seven minutes). There are......
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Angels of Light | Everything Is Good Here/Please Come Home | Review
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Dominique Leonelends an epic, almost timeless quality that goes a long way toward fleshing out Gira's often-mythological way with wordsTo a certain extent, most of us are still living sheltered lives, insofar as we rarely confront our spirituality, reject our families, or cross our internal lines of social decency. Beliefs and codes vary from person to person like wardrobes, but very few people are willful, foolish or terminally self-aware enough to defy their own. Cultural expectations-- "absurd and malignant" or otherwise-- have sway, and the precious, indecent few who manage to outrun them are generally viewed as outcasts or criminals (though sometimes, as prophets). Aside from whatever law they break, criminals rob us of our conventions: through acts of violence and upheaval, they force us to confront our boundaries. For some, ignoring the tenuous line between right and wrong is an easy feat, but for others, personal demons are as controlling as any backlog of cultural norms. From the sound of Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home, Angels of Light (and Young God figurehead Michael Gira) may yet have demons to master, and boundaries to set. Gira broached straightforward indecency long ago, via his most infamous and acclaimed project, Swans.......
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DEVENDRA BANHART | live | review
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L.A. Weekly | Alec Hanley Bemisat the Silverlake Lounge, January 17Both Devendra Banhart and his opening act, Entrance, played music that fit neatly into the tortured-troubadour tradition that unites Van Morrison, Syd Barrett, Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley and Elliott Smith. The less said about Entrance (a.k.a. 21-year-old Guy Blakeslee) the better. He had the outfit right ‹ b&w striped shirt; purple velvet jacket; I think his shoes were Clark's ‹ but a hot outfit and tousled black curls do not a tuneful voice make. His meandering acoustic thrash was intolerable, like nails on a chalkboard or cats having their tails chopped off. As the bearded, black-haired Banhart removed his brown cloche hat and sat Indian-style on an Oriental rug in the middle of the stage, one feared we were in for more posturing. But obviously he is committed to the wigged-out path: He would retain the cross-legged pose for the rest of his performance; a front row of about 20 audience members did the same. This was but the first sign of his power as a performer; his eccentricities had already charmed us. At 11:30, Banhart took out his guitar, asked for a glass of red wine, closed......
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Devendra Banhart | Oh Me Oh My | Review
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LA Weekly | John Paynecreepy songlike items on his broken 4-track cassette machineA good sign: One listen to Devendra Banhart's Oh Me Oh My on Young God Records will possibly tell you that you can't easily decipher what you're hearing. Former art student Devendra used to make small, creepy songlike items on his broken 4-track cassette machine, itty-bitty scraps of thoughts/impressions, poetic prose in simple frames of spidery acoustic guitar and a startling voice that warbles high, fretful and foreboding - vulnerable, of course, but comforting, too. Devendra's making that kind of prickly art for 2003, and Oh Me captures the pure soul of his nonsensical or intensely sensitive views with no production fuss (none needed), a lot of scratchy vérité, loads of actually fantastic guitar picking and several thrillingly unconventional song shapes. Yes, Syd Barrett's your handy ref. point, and Devendra's too, but what in lesser hands would be merely irritating is in Devendra's undeniably authentic and even authoritative. Oh Me sets new (its own) standards; by the end of one spin, it's not weird at all, more a darkly angelic kind of beautiful....
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Devendra Banhart | Review
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Los Angeles Times | Richard CromelinIn a day's quirk The enchanting music Devendra Banhart made just for himself catches on. It's been awhile since an obsessive, naïve, utterly original musical visionary -- a Beck, a Vic Chesnutt -- emerged from a private sanctum into the embrace of the rock cognoscenti. But we've got one now. On his debut album, Devendra Banhart sounds something like a demented Donovan, traversing the enchanted and haunted woods of his mind. Surreal images and nursery rhyme-catchy melodies spin a spell of deep mystery, and Banhart sings them with an idiosyncratic tremble that's been likened to early Marc Bolan -- though the 21-year-old says he didn't hear the late English star until after he'd made his record. Well, he didn't actually make a record. "Oh Me Oh My ... " (the start of a 22-word title) is simply a collection of raw demos, complete with distant crashes, surface noise and tape flaws. "I thought the way they're recorded adds to the ambience of what he's doing," says Michael Gira, whose Young God Records released "Oh Me" late last year. "If you listen to old Robert Johnson stuff, the hiss is louder than the voice usually, so......