Tag Archives: michael gira

Michael Gira, Geneva Casino Theatre, 7 February 2018

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Although Michael Gira has let it be known that the most recent Swans tour was the last in the current iteration of this veteran 36-year-old project, there seem to be no corresponding closure plans for Gira’s parallel career as a solo artist. Indeed, Gira seems to regard solo performance as some kind of workshop for Swans, with many songs initially given solo outings eventually winding up in fully-fledged form as Swans efforts. This has the unfortunate effect of making a Michael Gira solo concert feel like listening to a series of demos, with all the sketchy and provisional qualities that implies.

In fact, out of the eleven or so songs played by Gira at his Geneva concert in February, I reckon only four were actually new, with the others hailing from various stages of the Gira/Swans/Angels of Light back catalogue. But the familiarity (to this long-time Gira-watcher, at least) of those seven old songs was never enough to bring this concert above the level of the formulaic. This was essentially long-form busking, with Gira’s rudimentary guitar laying the foundation for a series of hectoring, haranguing outbursts that put me in mind of my occasional Sunday afternoon visits to Speaker’s Corner at Hyde Park in the early 1990s.

Bereft of kindness, warmth and sensitivity, Gira’s stentorian bellow is not an easy thing to love, and the downer hearing it at length put me on during this concert was only exacerbated by the increasingly turgid and overblown nature of Gira’s texts. Gira’s lyrics tend towards the sulphurous and messianic, with a limited schema of lyrical tropes that rely heavily on reach-me-down apocalyptic imagery. Governed by grindingly repetitive chord structures, delivered in tones that range from the meekly defeated to the perpetually outraged, these songs lurch onwards and ultimately collapse under the weight of their own absurdity.

The new songs Gira gave us a taste of in Geneva were more than enough to confirm my feeling that the Swans project has reached a creative dead end. “Are We Sleeping?” was a progressively glib list of bilious observations, “The Hanging Man” relied on a spat-out “NOT” for effect like some cheapjack horror flick, while “You Will Pay” (I make no claims as to the accuracy of these song titles, by the way) was only put out of its misery after a long, rancorous spoken-word outro. It was a blessed relief, then, to have this concert end with the piercingly sad and deeply moving “God Damn The Sun”, a song that has haunted me for almost 30 years and a rare instance of Gira letting the song breathe and tell its own story, rather than being locked up in grotesque contortions of its own making.

Michael Gira, Vienna Chelsea, 23 April 2012

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There’s not much that can stop Michael Gira from singing when he’s in full-throated rage mode. Those who foolishly spend their time talking instead of listening will probably earn themselves a caustic putdown. The last time he played solo in Vienna, some hapless individual with a video camera (who was, unbelievably, part of the promoter’s team) clambered onstage and started filming Gira in close-up, causing the singer to break off in mid-song and shout “get off the f***ing stage” repeatedly until the miserable cur backed away. And last month at the Chelsea, Gira met a new nemesis: a wasp. He called it a bee, but I was close enough to see it, and it definitely looked like a wasp to me. The wretched vespid landed on Gira’s microphone mere inches from his mouth, whence it could easily have flown had he not expectorated forcefully in mid-song and driven the little bugger away.

That was just one of many fine moments in this intense and draining concert, during which Gira presented stripped down acoustic versions of Swans and Angels of Light tunes, plus several as yet unrecorded songs. For all Gira’s easygoing onstage banter, what came across most strongly were the anger and tragedy that flow through these relentlessly bleak songs. There seems little room for warmth or hope in Gira’s universe, little sense that the despair he evokes is anything other than an immutable condition. He communicates that despair not only via his texts – long, discursive lyrics shot through with violent and apocalyptic imagery – but in his stark, bony guitar playing and the extraordinary reach of his baritone. That voice dominates the performance. Stricken, vulnerable and brimming with pain and rage, it is a voice of immense and unutterable sadness. And listening to the inexorable force which with Gira sings, you come to the conclusion that his harrowing worldview is the only one that makes sense anymore.

Swans Are Not Dead

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The news that Michael Gira is resurrecting the Swans name for an album and tour this year is scarcely believable but overwhelmingly thrilling. I just want to bump this piece, ostensibly a review of a 2008 solo show in Vienna by Gira, but really some kind of fumbling towards an explanation of why Swans are so hugely important and special to me. For this and other reasons, 2010 is shaping up to be a beautiful year.

Jarboe, Budapest Vörös Yuk, 8 June 2009

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Since Jarboe’s planned concert in Vienna was cancelled in murky circumstances, it was a no-brainer for me to make the trip to the nearest place she was playing, which turned out to be Budapest. This is no trainspotters’ blog, but I do feel obliged to mention the excellent ÖBB Railjet service which whisked me from Westbahnhof to Budapest in exactly three hours, in remarkable comfort and to-the-minute punctuality. British trains, I do not miss you at all.

I wrote a short reminiscence of Swans under the guise of a review of Michael Gira’s concert in Vienna last November, which touched on the kindness and generosity Jarboe showed me in the early days of my friendship with her. Ironically, while Gira has for the most part opened up his muse to softer and more acoustic elements since ending Swans, Jarboe’s own post-Swans work has recently been heading in the other direction, towards the theatricality and brute force of black metal. But this really shouldn’t be seen as too much of a surprise. Intensely aware of gods, demons and other spectral presences, Jarboe’s music has always revolved around the kind of incantatory invocations that the BM scene also relishes.

What makes Jarboe extraordinary, though, is the sense of humility and abasement that she brings to her on-stage persona. For at least half of this concert, she came down from the stage and sang while standing amongst the (almost exclusively male) audience, her long blonde hair shrouding her face, her voice howling and trembling in supplication. This was no mere theatrical diversion, but a deliberate strategy on Jarboe’s part to place herself in a position of utter abjection. The resulting cauldron of lamentation was both sexually charged and unbearably moving.

Jarboe’s songs are protean; they refuse to take on the properties of songs, sounding instead like hectoring blasts of black energy. The guitar, bass and drums pulsate menacingly, as though calling up apparitions given voice by Jarboe’s sepulchral keening. The performance resonates with an elegiac, mystical beauty.

Michael Gira has indicated that he may resurrect the Swans name for a new album and tour, a move which (needless to say) I would wholeheartedly welcome. Jarboe, sadly, is unlikely to be a part of any such endeavour; but on the evidence of this show, Gira will have to go some to match the level of draining intensity reached by his erstwhile bandmate.

Ether column, November 2008

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The Vienna Songwriting Association are a fine group of individuals who promote concerts of folk and acoustic music all year round in this city. As well as this, every November they put on a three-day festival of internationally known artists, the Bluebird Festival, at Porgy & Bess. There are some great names at this year’s event, such as Okkervil River playing almost a year to the day since their last appearance in Vienna. I raved about them in my November 2007 column, so let’s talk instead about one of my all-time musical heroes, American singer and songwriter Michael Gira. Gira initially made his name as the driving force behind Swans, a crushingly loud and formidable outfit who emerged from the creative ferment that was early ’80s downtown New York. When they first came to public attention, Swans presented a vision of rock music as a form of abjection, with bone-crunching percussion to the fore and lyrics that focused relentlessly on traumatic explorations of work, sex and the body. Over the years they gradually let the light in, bringing softer and more acoustic textures into their music. After Gira ended Swans in 1997 he began a new project, the Angels of Light, which placed even more emphasis on acoustic elements. In all of these incarnations, however, Gira has never swerved from an implacable belief in the atavistic power of the song. Straining with every muscle and sinew of his body, he sings with immense authority and commitment, every moment of his performance filled with tenderness and rage. This rare solo appearance by one of rock music’s most exceptional talents should on no account be missed.

Early next month, soulful British group Tindersticks stop off in Vienna on their first tour in several years. Like many others, I had doubted that they would ever return to active service. Over 15 years and seven albums, Tindersticks have perfected a literate and highly listenable blend of alternative rock, chamber music, soul and jazz, defined by rich string-laden orchestrations and the desolate croon of singer and lyricist Stuart Staples. Having released nothing new since 2003 and with rumours of a split rife, their story seemed on the brink of an end; to my great pleasure, however, they are back with an excellent new album, The Hungry Saw. Although three of the original members have now left, the new album is a worthy addition to the group’s catalogue and will no doubt be subjected to passionate live treatment. Staples is an enigmatic figure, rarely speaking onstage and often seeming to be transported elsewhere as he performs; he has remained tight-lipped about the reasons for the split. But the group bring a marvellously intuitive sense of drama and mystery to their songs, with violin, brass and organ enveloping the listener in a warm and tender embrace.

Michael Gira, Porgy & Bess, Vienna, 21 November 2008

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There seems to be an occasional series of concert reviews on this blog — see Leonard Cohen, Whitehouse and Einstürzende Neubauten — that mostly consist of Epiphanies-style reminiscences of my first awareness of the artist in question. This, though, is the one I’ve been waiting to write — how I fell in love with Swans, the most important group of my life.

I recall the time very well. I was at Sussex University in 1987, casting around for new music to love. I had outgrown the obsessions with Gary Numan and Pink Floyd that marked my teenage years, had taken quite happily to the subdued acoustic muse of Leonard Cohen and Suzanne Vega, but was undoubtedly in need of something more acute. Every week I would scour the pages of the NME — still then my main source of music news, although not for much longer — in search of wisdom and enlightenment. One week I read a review of Swans’ Children of God that was to change my life, although I didn’t know it at the time. I can’t remember who penned it, but this is how it concluded: “And it’s ugly, and it’s difficult, and it’s long and sometimes wearying, and peculiarly beautiful, and utterly essential.” Well, that was it for me. I had never heard a note of this music, had no great history of liking this kind of thing, but when I saw that Swans (not The Swans, as I quickly learned) were playing in Brighton soon, I bought a ticket straight away. I got the album the day after the concert, and I was hooked for life.

Over the next few years, I saw Swans live a few more times (at the Zap Club on the seafront, and in London at the Town & Country Club and the now defunct Kilburn National Ballroom), and bought each new record as it came out, enthralled by the beauty and power inherent in this music. The real turning point, however, came when I wrote a fan letter to the address printed on the cover of 1991’s White Light From The Mouth of Infinity. I expected to hear back, if at all, from some kind of management flunkey; what I certainly didn’t expect was to receive a long and detailed reply from singer and keyboard player Jarboe herself. This kindness and generosity continued over many years in her correspondence with me; in those pre-email days it was a genuine thrill when a letter postmarked Atlanta dropped through my letterbox.

The apex of my association with Swans came in 1997 when Michael Gira asked me to be the merchandise seller on their farewell tour of Europe. As one might imagine, this was an offer I mulled over for perhaps 1.5 seconds before accepting. It was the experience of a lifetime, with 30-odd concerts over six weeks in such widespread countries as France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria (yes, the Szene Wien), Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Slovenia, with the last ever Swans concert taking place in my then home town of London on 15 March 1997, in the rather dingy surroundings of the now defunct LA2. Out there somewhere, there’s a recording of that night in which Gira makes a between-songs announcement thanking me for my work on the tour. I don’t have a copy myself, so please get in touch if you do. Rather mind-bogglingly, those words were the last he ever spoke (as opposed to sang) from the stage as a member of Swans.

I have a tour-bus load of memories of those six weeks, the good, the bad and the ugly, but if it’s all the same to you I’m going to keep them to myself (with the exception of this rather facetious letter which I wrote to The Wire last year). I will say that it was by some measure the hardest work I’ve ever done; this was not a matter of a few T-shirts. There were shirts, books, CDs, records, tapes, badges, stickers and wooden boxes, all of which had to be loaded in and out, sold and accounted for in any number of currencies (no euros then!). I’m well aware, though, that I was slumming it compared to the Herculean nightly efforts of the band and the rest of the road crew. And if anyone reading this bought anything from the merch table on Swans’ last European tour, I hope you were happy with what you bought.

Fast forward eleven years and I’m at Porgy & Bess for a solo concert by Michael Gira. This form represents a distillation and finessing of everything I ever loved about Swans: the brimming rage, the barely controlled power and the passionate intensity. The lyrics, as ever, are extraordinary: visionary, convulsive flashes of elemental forces, drenched in deep colours hewn from the strings and wood of Gira’s guitar. And when he plays my favourite Swans song, the overwhelmingly bleak and nihilistic “God Damn The Sun,” as the encore, I think… well, at the very least, I’m in the right place tonight.

Michael Gira: Songs for a Dog

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An odd release, this – a mish-mash of previously released and unreleased material, it nevertheless provide a useful introduction to one side of Michael Gira’s post-Swans work.

Half of the ten songs are taken from I Am Singing to You From My Room, a solo CD originally released in a limited edition of 1000 through Gira’s website (a second edition is now available). Of the rest, two reappear from What We Did, Gira’s collaborative CD with Dan Matz of Windsor for the Derby, while one is an outtake from the sessions that produced New Mother, the first album by Gira’s principal post-Swans project, Angels of Light. Finally, there’s a solo version of one of Swans’ most harrowing songs, “God Damn The Sun”, and one completely new song, “Promise of Water”.

These songs represent Gira’s muse at its most stripped down and intimate, reflecting his urge to communicate through the simplest and purest of means. For the most part, they are shorn of the baroque intensity that characterises Gira’s work as Angels of Light. Although they consist of just a voice and an acoustic guitar, these are not folk songs. Wrought from dark, atavistic impulses, they proceed in a manner more akin to a sermon. Gira’s authoritative baritone moves effortlessly between the gentle, the reproachful and the accusatory, inhabiting the songs utterly and turning them into vehicles for spontaneous, unmediated expression. The lyrics are rapturous explosions of hallucinatory imagery, saturated in colours and sensations, while the guitar playing is a sinister, vertiginous thrumming. This is a truly potent mix; Gira’s take on songform is dazzling and unique.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 16, 2008)

Letter to The Wire, December 2007

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As I was lucky enough to be a member of the road crew on the final Swans tour in 1997, I can vouch for the accuracy of Michael Gira’s description of the “stinky old Heavy Metal tour bus” that carted us around Europe (Invisible Jukebox, The Wire 286). Gira is also spot on regarding the lugubrious humour of Pan Sonic (or Panasonic, as they were then known). During a lengthy debate on the merits of ten-pin bowling, Mika Vainio responded to a criticism that the scoring system was unnecessarily complex with the doleful comment “It does not matter what is the score”.

Angels of Light: How I Loved You, Angels of Light: We Were Alive!, Michael Gira & Dan Matz: What We Did

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When Michael Gira disbanded Swans in 1997, his main reason was that the weight of expectation surrounding the group’s name had become a liability. Since 1982, Swans had marshalled the transformative qualities of sound in a way that was, and remains, unparalleled in rock. The lurching Industrial rhythms of their earliest work were gradually sloughed off in favour of visionary, crescendo-laden sunbursts. Their last album, Soundtracks For The Blind, mixed intense balladry with spoken word tape loops and Ambient textures to ecstatic effect.

Since then, Gira has further refined his exploration into the redemptive powers of the song with the Angels of Light. (The parallel Body Lovers project, of which the first part of a promised trilogy has so far appeared, continues the journey into the realms of the psycho-Ambient.) How I Loved You, the second Angels of Light album, has recently been complemented by the release of a limited (750) edition live CD, We Were Alive!, available only through Gira’s website.

Gira is nothing if not a soul singer, and the ten songs comprising How I Loved You are saturated with pure, heartfelt emotion. The voice is bitter, regretful and yearning, as Gira maps out vast territories of love and loss. While some of Swans’ visceral attack may have been purged, there is certainly no let-up in the masterful play of tension and release on which these songs turn. The acoustic guitar is at the forefront, augmented by breathy accordion, wisps of pedal steel and firmly insistent percussion.

‘Evangeline’ is how Leonard Cohen should sound these days, if his once rich muse hadn’t been terminally derailed by clodhopping irony and an inexplicable liking for cheesy synthesised arrangements. Gira assumes the role of romantic troubadour with ease, his closely miked vocals suffused with a graceful eroticism. ‘My True Body’ is much darker. Gira comes on like an old time preacher, while the song is driven along by thunderous drumming.

The Angels really take flight, however, on the centrepiece ‘New City In The Future’ and the closing ‘Two Women’. Both last over ten minutes, and both are flawless blends of rousing chord progressions and achingly vivid melodic intensity. Multitracked guitars reverberate endlessly around Gira’s passionate incantations of desire and possession.

The live album captures the Angels at a 2001 concert in Toronto. The sound quality is not perfect, but the immense power of the ensemble is well in evidence, as are the sublime touches of glockenspiel and accordion that add light and shade everywhere. Five new songs are aired, including the exceptional ‘All Souls Rising’, and in deference to history the concert ends with emotive readings of two of Swans’ finest songs, ‘God Damn The Sun’ and ‘Failure’. The CD is nicely packaged in a clear plastic wallet with a printed envelope and personalised artwork.

What We Did is a more intimate affair, a collaboration between Gira and Dan Matz of Windsor For The Derby (who supported Swans on tour in 1997). These songs edge towards the mythic Americana of the Band and Gram Parsons. Gira and Matz alternate lead vocals, and the gently played acoustic guitar patterns are strengthened by atmospheric piano and harmonica. The pairing results in an album that quietly seduces the listener with its warmth and understated sensitivity.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 11, 2003)

Swans: Various Failures, Angels of Light: New Mother, Body Lovers: Body Lovers

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Michael Gira is a myth-maker, acutely aware of the danger of ossification and constantly realigning his position to avoid it. When Swans emerged in the early 1980s, their grindingly repetitious sonic assault (once memorably described as “the sound of a man walking round in circles with his neck chained”) seemed like a strategy for obsessive rearrangement of a basic set of lyrical and musical permutations. The songs didn’t end; they stopped.

Gira eventually tired of this game and, coincident with the introduction of female vocalist/keyboardist Jarboe, began to introduce chilling acoustic elements into his songwriting on 1987’s essential Children of God LP. Over the next several years, Swans would refine and develop this approach in a series of albums that merged immense rhythmic power with an unearthly delicacy of acoustic instrumentation.These records – 1989’s The Burning World, 1991’s White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and 1992’s Love of Life – have long been deleted and are consequently much sought after. Various Failures is a double CD containing a generous selection of material from the period (complete reissues were ruled out, partly on economic grounds but also because Gira was content to let some of the songs disappear).

Listening again to this music, one is struck by how expansive it all sounds, the polar opposite of the early records’ savage inward spin. The loudest pieces here, such as ‘Will We Survive’ and the wonderfully titled ‘The Golden Boy that was Swallowed by the Sea’, are mesmerising dramas of layered orchestration, the massed guitars and drums perfectly framing Gira’s resonant vocals. These songs construct boundaries only to dissolve them: the spaces they occupy are vast and limitless. Elsewhere, Gira and Jarboe offer up unbearable intimacies of form and language, with the shimmering acoustic beauty of the music and the spectral sighs of Jarboe’s voice drawing the listener unmercifully into dense narratives of isolation and failure.

Gira has taken this loose, bluesy strain even further in his new song-based project, Angels of Light. These songs are less reliant on the apocalyptic visual imagery that underpinned Swans’ relentless, thrilling surge. Gira’s new voice is one of humble intimacy, the sound of a man shedding past burdens and discovering new ways of seeing. The musical palette is restrained and absorbing, with accordion and dulcimer adding colour and intimacy throughout.

The results are occasionally stunning; ‘Forever Yours’ and ‘Song For My Father’ in particular are among the most affecting things Gira has written. But there is a schematic quality to some of the other songs that strikes a jarring note. The lyrics are recited slowly and dolefully, with little melodic invention to lighten the mood. At their recent London concert, the Angels of Light shrugged off these limitations in the songs and transformed them into blinding, ecstatic convulsions of pure energy. The record, sadly, suffers from a listlessness that the warm and delicate arrangements are unable to dissipate.

If New Mother represents a slackening off from Swans’ intense emotional charge, Gira’s parallel Body Lovers/Body Haters project can be seen as a move in the opposite direction, a ratcheting of atmosphere and tension. These two CDs, representing the first phase in a projected three-album series, were originally issued separately in the USA and have now been brought together for European release.

Gira accurately describes this mainly instrumental music as ‘psycho-ambient’. While its abstract drifts and swirls share many of the formal properties of Ambient, they are determinedly inward-looking. Also, unlike much Ambient there is a restless intelligence at work here, ordering, shaping and defining. Distant, rumbling drones are picked apart by alien sounds, stately rhythms and sparing acoustic instrumentation. Occasional vocal interventions – a woman’s weeping, a baby’s screaming and a short, mournful song – all serve to heighten the sense of unease. Seriously effective, but not to be listened to with the lights off.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 6, 1999)