TUE., AUGUST 28, 2007
Michael Gira's Vile and Glorious Bodies
by Douglas Wolk
The first time I heard Michael Gira's old band Swans, they creeped me out me so badly I didn't try to listen to them again for a dozen years. I was maybe 16 years old, and I'd picked up one of their early records because I liked the cover art. What I was hearing, I thought at the time, was the closest my turntable had ever come to water torture: crushingly slow, atonal, brutal stuff, with Gira roaring like a flayed evangelist: "Open your mouth!/ Here is your money!/ Holy money!/ Holy love!"
Other Swans records from that early-to-mid-'80s era mostly stuck to arrangements that sounded like trash compactors soaked in Robitussin, and their lyrics surveyed a pretty narrow territory: body horror, sadomasochism, holiness, blood, blood relations and good old l-u-v. "Put your knife in me/ Walk away/ I'm worthless/ I love you," ran one flirtatious little ditty. The early-tapes anthology Body to Body, Job to Job features the archetypal Swans song title: "Mother, My Body Disgusts Me."
Gira's always been interested in evoking massive, overwhelming, sublime force — something that's so huge that it obliterates the rest of the world. Within a few years, though, he stopped trying to do it the most literal way, by pulverizing his audience. Another songwriter, a woman with a razorblade voice, known only as Jarboe, joined Swans in the mid '80s, and together she and Gira steered the band toward a less ritualized, more aestheticized kind of music — still obsessed with erotic violence, but focused more on the erotic side. The cottony haze of circa-1990 records like White Light from the Mouth of Infinity seemed to mask the band's throbbing crunch, like a narcotic that makes pain seem abstract and far away.
The record that brought me back into the fold, though, was Swans' studio swan song: 1996's Soundtracks for the Blind. It's overwhelming in a very different way from their earliest records, slow and richly majestic, sometimes even beautiful, assembled and paced to sweep the listener along for well over two hours. As usual, the lyrics are focused on blood and bodies, halos and helpless children and screaming slaves, but half the songs are instrumentals or sound collages — it's a painstakingly detailed map of an ash-blanketed psychological landscape. (Maybe even better is the two-disc live post-mortem, 1998's Swans Are Dead, a survey of their entire career, with even their bludgeoning early rant "I Crawled" translated into their lusher, later idiom.)
As Joe Strummer put it, "he who fucks nuns will later join the church." The name of Gira's longstanding post-Swans band, Angels of Light, is the giveaway: all that howling about holiness led him to some kind of genuine, if unconventional, reverence. Over the last eight years, AoL — Gira and whoever else is in the room, basically — have made five studio albums (plus a split album with Akron/Family), all released on Gira's label Young God Records, and all marked by the ways he's tried to distance his current band from Swans. (The best introduction to the Angels side of his career is probably 2001's wrenching How I Loved You.) Gira has followed more or less the same career arc as Nick Cave over the past 25 years, but it's hard to imagine him trying something with the missing-toothed grin of Cave's Grinderman project. On the other hand, every moment of tenderness or understatement on Angels of Light's new We Are Him feels like Gira fought and bled for the right to it, which makes the flashes of his old epic violence doubly scary.
One thing that turns up again and again in Gira's work is an obsession with bodies, and that extends to his own body of work: We Are Him, like virtually every record in his discography, is a reaction to and elaboration on his earlier recordings, an element in a lifelong corpus. AoL maintains Gira's tone of high seriousness, but their songs are built on partly acoustic instrumentation, with strings and horns and even choral arrangements supplanting the old waves of noise, and unlike Swans, they mostly admit the possibility of hope or redemption. The title of We Are Him is almost a renunciation of Gira's old vision of a world utterly cut off from divinity — it suggests, as the liturgy puts it, vile bodies changed to glorious bodies. The song of the same name is an electric incantation: "we are him" (or "Him"?), Gira declares, and the backup singers reply "in the sun!" And "Sunflower's Here to Stay" is not just a jaunty pop song but a hymn, and if it's an ironic one it hides its irony well.
Most of the new album's songs have comparatively simple structures — they cleave to a single chord or pivot between two, repeating little piano or violin or guitar phrases, and foregrounding Gira's hard-weathered basso voice. Still, there are certain constants with his work, like its undercurrents of familial rage and sexual regret; if there's an archetypal Angels of Light song title, it's "Sometimes I Dream I'm Hurting You." "Promise of Water" is a slow-building one-chord blues, with Gira intoning "when you open your mouth you're too stupid to scream" — a line that could have come from him any time in the last quarter-century. He's still thinking and singing about emotion so huge that it can annihilate the mind and body. Now, though, he's got enough distance from it that it can appear in the form of absolute light as well as absolute darkness, as glorious as it is terrible.
Other Swans records from that early-to-mid-'80s era mostly stuck to arrangements that sounded like trash compactors soaked in Robitussin, and their lyrics surveyed a pretty narrow territory: body horror, sadomasochism, holiness, blood, blood relations and good old l-u-v. "Put your knife in me/ Walk away/ I'm worthless/ I love you," ran one flirtatious little ditty. The early-tapes anthology Body to Body, Job to Job features the archetypal Swans song title: "Mother, My Body Disgusts Me."
Gira's always been interested in evoking massive, overwhelming, sublime force — something that's so huge that it obliterates the rest of the world. Within a few years, though, he stopped trying to do it the most literal way, by pulverizing his audience. Another songwriter, a woman with a razorblade voice, known only as Jarboe, joined Swans in the mid '80s, and together she and Gira steered the band toward a less ritualized, more aestheticized kind of music — still obsessed with erotic violence, but focused more on the erotic side. The cottony haze of circa-1990 records like White Light from the Mouth of Infinity seemed to mask the band's throbbing crunch, like a narcotic that makes pain seem abstract and far away.
The record that brought me back into the fold, though, was Swans' studio swan song: 1996's Soundtracks for the Blind. It's overwhelming in a very different way from their earliest records, slow and richly majestic, sometimes even beautiful, assembled and paced to sweep the listener along for well over two hours. As usual, the lyrics are focused on blood and bodies, halos and helpless children and screaming slaves, but half the songs are instrumentals or sound collages — it's a painstakingly detailed map of an ash-blanketed psychological landscape. (Maybe even better is the two-disc live post-mortem, 1998's Swans Are Dead, a survey of their entire career, with even their bludgeoning early rant "I Crawled" translated into their lusher, later idiom.)
As Joe Strummer put it, "he who fucks nuns will later join the church." The name of Gira's longstanding post-Swans band, Angels of Light, is the giveaway: all that howling about holiness led him to some kind of genuine, if unconventional, reverence. Over the last eight years, AoL — Gira and whoever else is in the room, basically — have made five studio albums (plus a split album with Akron/Family), all released on Gira's label Young God Records, and all marked by the ways he's tried to distance his current band from Swans. (The best introduction to the Angels side of his career is probably 2001's wrenching How I Loved You.) Gira has followed more or less the same career arc as Nick Cave over the past 25 years, but it's hard to imagine him trying something with the missing-toothed grin of Cave's Grinderman project. On the other hand, every moment of tenderness or understatement on Angels of Light's new We Are Him feels like Gira fought and bled for the right to it, which makes the flashes of his old epic violence doubly scary.
One thing that turns up again and again in Gira's work is an obsession with bodies, and that extends to his own body of work: We Are Him, like virtually every record in his discography, is a reaction to and elaboration on his earlier recordings, an element in a lifelong corpus. AoL maintains Gira's tone of high seriousness, but their songs are built on partly acoustic instrumentation, with strings and horns and even choral arrangements supplanting the old waves of noise, and unlike Swans, they mostly admit the possibility of hope or redemption. The title of We Are Him is almost a renunciation of Gira's old vision of a world utterly cut off from divinity — it suggests, as the liturgy puts it, vile bodies changed to glorious bodies. The song of the same name is an electric incantation: "we are him" (or "Him"?), Gira declares, and the backup singers reply "in the sun!" And "Sunflower's Here to Stay" is not just a jaunty pop song but a hymn, and if it's an ironic one it hides its irony well.
Most of the new album's songs have comparatively simple structures — they cleave to a single chord or pivot between two, repeating little piano or violin or guitar phrases, and foregrounding Gira's hard-weathered basso voice. Still, there are certain constants with his work, like its undercurrents of familial rage and sexual regret; if there's an archetypal Angels of Light song title, it's "Sometimes I Dream I'm Hurting You." "Promise of Water" is a slow-building one-chord blues, with Gira intoning "when you open your mouth you're too stupid to scream" — a line that could have come from him any time in the last quarter-century. He's still thinking and singing about emotion so huge that it can annihilate the mind and body. Now, though, he's got enough distance from it that it can appear in the form of absolute light as well as absolute darkness, as glorious as it is terrible.
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