CREEM ONLINE: Michael Gira

The Angels Of Light / Devendra Banhart / Terror At The Opera
The Magic Stick, Detroit
April 2, 2003

The soundman charges the stage, shouting at the band to stop. The audience crouches on the beer-stained floor, covering their heads like children caught in a hurricane.

It’s not that the Angels of Light are loud. Their amps are modest, and there isn’t a drum on the stage.

It’s not that they’re aggressive. Patrick Fondiller is a burly giant, but he cradles a small mandolin. When the music climbs towards a vertiginous peak, he picks up a bass, and sketches the soft green view below. Devendra Banhart’s voice may startle, but it doesn’t threaten. It’s the cry of a tropical bird gliding on a warm updraft. Christoph Hahn’s steel guitar tucks even the most dissonant chords beneath a thick blanket of drone.

If there’s any menace on the stage, it’s in the cold eyes of Angels mastermind Michael Gira. This is the man who envisioned Swans. Under his icy gaze, rock slowed until its energy became mass. Drum beats solidified into stark black obelisks, dissonant guitar into barren plains. Most desolate of all were Gira’s lyrics: blunt equations of money, sex, and power.

Two decades later, harsh masterpieces Filth and Cop still cast a shadow over Gira’s career. "Sometimes the whole ‘dark, heavy, loud, ugly’ thing really annoys me, because I’m not like that anymore," says Gira. "I relied for years on very loud amplification solely, but gradually changed and started finding new ways to make something happen."

Tonight, Gira’s not barking slogans, but telling stories. "Stories based on things I’ve experienced, to books I’ve read, to events in the media; little hagiographies of people I’ve loved or known or admired."

Some of his stories hide unsettling themes beneath a deceptively pretty surface. "Kosinski," for instance, is a moonlit fairy tale, inspired by the sordid life of a suicidal plagiarist.

The clashing harmonics of "Michael’s White Hands" are dedicated to the dethroned King of Pop. "I sort of conjoined him with the whole fear of poison and terror, and looked at them as equal, like he was the prophet bringing that on."

"Nations" deals with the experience of living in New York as the World Trade Center fell. "I studiously attempted to avoid any kind of preachy or sentimental quality about it. I’ll leave that up to Bruce and other people," says Gira. "I take images from the media and use them, without being cold or distant about it. It’s part of my experience too. I look at it as a media event, and kind of a shared consciousness event: a shared nightmare, a shared lie, a shared falsity, a shared tragedy."

Swans songs "Failure" and "God Damn the Sun" are performed as hushed acoustic meditations. Alone on stage in a Nashville suit, Gira is a classic American songwriter, dusting off old favorites for a generation raised on noise. The crowd relaxes and breathes the familiar air. Gira’s voice is a low rumble: the sound of a distant storm on the horizon, a gentle warning that the band will soon return to pour down another deluge.

If Swans’ landscape was an arid wasteland, the Angels inhabit a lush rainforest, where blossoms cover the lurking beasts and tangled vines fill every inch of space. Instead of pounding listeners with volume, Gira overwhelms them with variety. Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home, the newest album by the Angels of Light, teems with dulcimers, pianos, organs, accordions, vibraphones, violins, flutes, and horns. Sound is piled on top of sound, then topped with a children’s choir. On stage, Gira achieves the same effect with four sets of strings and the expansive voice of Devendra Banhart.

Banhart opens the show with a solo set. Cross-legged atop a table, with shaggy ringlets covering his scruffy face, he’s an unassuming figure. The crowd talks over his delicate fingerpicking, but falls silent when he opens his mouth and unleashes a series of high-pitched Ayler squawks, corroded Holiday rasps, and otherworldly Bolan twinkles.

He looks a bit like Charles Manson—the skinny Beach Boy, not the bloated jailbird—and like Manson, he leads a flock of young women through an intricate maze of personal symbolism. Banhart’s not sinister, though, but awkward and earnest: a bearded child. He gives the girls a bashful grin when they call out for more of his fluttering song fragments.

He’s still smiling when he joins Gira on stage. If Banhart hopes to dedicate his life to an idiosyncratic musical vision, he could not hope for a better mentor. Gira has been chasing his own strange muse for more years than Banhart has lived, and he shows no sign of stopping. Ignoring the enraged soundman buzzing around their feet, Gira and Banhart continue to sing.

A thousand miles of trackless wilderness separate Banhart’s dewy falsetto from Gira’s parched baritone. Those woods are here tonight, waiting to be explored, but most of us hesitate at the border. It’s growing late, and we have our own little gardens to tend to. Still, even the most homebound heart grows warm when a raven-haired gothette rises from the floor, kicks off her heavy black boots, and goes dancing off into the trees.