The
Angels of Light, Stars of the Lid
EJ's, 2140 NE Sandy Blvd., 234-3535
10 pm Tuesday, June 22
$8 advance
The quiet is what's most striking.
This is true of both New Mother, the delicate debut
album by the Angels of Light, Michael Gira's new band, and
Gira himself, as his voice floats calmly across telephone
lines from New York City. For the infamously tense, near-tyrannical
leader of Swans--the atavistic anti-art group that, for
15 years, hammered audiences with strident, percussive harshness,
taunted them with fleeting beauty, then suffocated them
in sheets of blood- and sweat-stained noise--this is indeed
a surprise.
"I'm the same person, so I can't escape that," Gira muses
about the noticeable change between Swans and the Angels
of Light. "But I'm trying to excise the capacity for evil
I have in myself and move on."
For Gira (pronounced zheer-ah), that meant unbuckling the
"mental straitjacket" of Swans and shedding the public expectation
that he must make obsessively sculpted pillars of oppressive
music his life's work. "Nowadays," he says, "I just sit
down and write a song. I'm more interested in trying to
make something that has a personal resonance, which hopefully
bleeds through the record."
New Mother achieves this goal with unexpected fragility.
Where Swans once pummeled, Angels of Light pause. Where
Gira once roared, now he croons. Melody substitutes for
menace. Sparse arrangements of acoustic guitar, vibraphone,
piano and minimal drums replace Swans' heavy bass and keyboards.
Folk and the blues enter without shame, and names like Cave,
Cohen, Cash and Eitzel rattle around the brain as potential
comparisons.
Though New Mother is undoubtedly the most gentle
project Gira has masterminded, it crawls with his usual
lyrical fixations: the mechanisms of desire; the limitations
of the body; power, devotion and control in relationships
(between lovers, family members or a man and his chosen
god); alcoholism; sex; death; remorse; regret. The music's
stark quietude, however, allows Gira to develop his tales
in a fuller, more narrative fashion.
While the album's intimate atmosphere sometimes makes you
feel as if you're peeling the skin away from Gira's chest
and watching his heart pump and squirm, he warns against
psychoanalyzing the lyrics in search of the "real" Michael
Gira.
"I don't like to indulge too much in personal confessions
on records," he says, "although on this record I allowed
myself to use my personal experience more. Hopefully I abstracted
it enough that people can use it themselves, you know, so
it's not just me complaining about my problems."
Gira then explains the inspiration behind some of the songs
on New Mother, the ones he calls "hagiographies"
of those who most affect his life: "Inner Female" is inspired
by famed surrealist painter Francis Bacon; "The Man with
the Silver Tongue" is based upon the bloody pagan art and
rituals of Viennese Actionists Rudolf Schwartzkogler and
Hermann Nitsch; "The Garden Hides the Jewel" is an interpretation
of Marcel Duchamp's erotic diorama Étant Donnés;
and "Praise Your Name" is, in Gira's laughing words, "a
tribute to some of the violent and vengeful women I've known."
Confronted with this last song, longtime Swans fans may
immediately think of Jarboe, who lent that band a fervid,
soul-burning female voice and became Gira's partner in music
and life. As Swans dissolved, so did the pair's relationship.
Jarboe's spirit hovers throughout New Mother--the
album is even dedicated to her--yet her absence is palpable.
After so many years of psycho-sonic collaboration, you have
to wonder how not having Jarboe around affected Gira's creativity.
"It's hard to describe without getting too personal, though
several songs deal with the topic of failed relationships,"
he confesses. "[New Mother is] a complete break from
the past, so I guess it was, in that sense, good not to
be working with Jarboe.... It was a good challenge to not
rely on certain things she had done."
This sense of liberation may be related to Gira's interest
in the nature of devotion and dependency. "People seem to
have a need to lose themselves in something, either through
religion or another person, or through television, media,
rock stars.... I may have that in myself," he says. "Sometimes
I think it's a profound thing, other times I think it's
very unhealthy and negative."
Swans, for him, became that unhealthy, negative submersion.
Rather than drown in Swans' overwhelming volume and sound,
Gira wants to escape into a space where the songs can breathe.
The Angels of Light are his getaway vehicle.
"I'm really trying to give myself to just playing songs
and letting them take over and letting the performance be
the thing," he says. "I don't know if I've managed that
yet, [but] when the music's going well, it's the happiest
I can possibly be."
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published June 16, 1999
|
