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- Albums and Singles
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- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
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- Albums and Singles
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- Albums and Singles
What's immediately striking about the third album by Michael Gira's Angels of Light is the visual presentation. The six photos—an empty chair, a cluttered desk, a room full of plants, a bookcase loaded with CDs and books, a rosary draped over a thermostat, and, perhaps most tellingly, an empty bedseem to paint a picture of a sufficient but lonely life.
Coupled with the title, one can't help but construe that Gira is sending out a clarion call to former partner Jarboe. Does he want her back or has he found peace on his own? Further lyrical clues are open to interpretation as Gira's songs often blur the lines between autobiography and fantasy. The opener, "Palisades," inquisitively details a suicide in which "reasons won't come, and no one will regret that you're gone." Gira whoops and hollers most on the climactic "All Souls' Rising," and "Nations," 2001 tour favorites. Conversely, he softly sings "with the rhythm of your breathing, with the rhythm of my thinking," over the tumbling, tender electric guitar notes and strums of "Kosinski." "The Rose of Los Angeles," another paean to Gira's mother, has drastically changed into a stomping romp with a decidedly Irish flavor. The crack of percussion and bluesy guitar disrupt the bleak reminiscences of "What You Were." "Sunset Park" repeats the single enigmatic line "she'll bring some, she brings some, she brings one, she'll bring one" ad nauseam in a swirling wall of sound march. Gira concludes the album with the half droned, half near-whispered, semi-optimistic prayer, "God save us, from what will come." Musically and thematically Everything feels more haphazard than the previous albums, and with none of the tracks exceeding seven minutes, it lacks the epics that made How I Loved You so stellar. Comparisons to the past aside, it's still a fine album. An impressive orchestra of cohorts was once again assembled to add varying degrees of layers to his voice and acoustic guitar, including everything from standard rock band instrumentation to mandolin, accordion, harmonium, flute, trombone, harmonica, banjo, fiddle and even a children's choir. A new version of the band sans drums—Gira (vocals, amplified acoustic guitar), Devendra Banhart (electric guitar), Christoph Hahn (lap steel and electric guitars) and Patrick Fondiller (bass guitar, mandolin, mandola)—is currently on tour in North America through late April with Banhart opening with a solo set.
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- Albums and Singles
Coil is easily playing some of their most haunting, spectral, hypnotic, and sublime material ever, combining the new with the old and doing so without the outcome sounding muddled or too disparate.Threshold House
The cohesiveness of the album is achieved in a couple of ways: "Last Rites of Spring" gets overhauled completely and extended into a 10 minute noise-fest. "Amethyst Deceivers" and "Ostia" are altered in small ways that result in a new sound but retain the spirit of the original. "Are You Shivering?" is the perfect misnomer; its glowing tones and soft, simple drum part are the perfect warm blanket. The firey, yet cleansing attack of "A Warning From the Sun," on the other hand, with its scratching and violent pandemonium easily reduced my brain to rubble and at the same time soothed it by way of whimsical melody. The extra treats, however, are three of the previously unreleased songs. "The Universe Is A Haunted House" begins with quiet echoing synths, water leaking from ceilings, and absolutely threatening promises of mischief from Jhon Balance. It later turns into a rhythm propelled freak-out session of LSD-like proportions. "Bang Bang (Sonny Bono)" is, strangely enough, a cover of a Cher tune. It is composed of piano, Balance's singing, and patches of serpentine glitchery that slither in and out of the air. It's also the closest Coil has ever come to performing a ballad. The album ends on a very high and exhilirating note with "An Unearthly Red." Here an explosive Balance screams and shouts over dissonant and jarring rhythms while fits of ecstatic decomposition bounce and detonate everywhere without remorse. Melody battles against a wall of distortion and tension builds and builds to a boiling point that just might make you sweat; this is one hell of a way to end a record. At this point I've almost completely forgotten that this is a live recording because the quality of the sound and the songs are so absolutely fantastic. Go buy this album, turn out the lights, turn on this record, and prepare to have your ears and mind blown away. 
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- Albums and Singles
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- Chris Lopreste
- Albums and Singles
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- Steve Smith
- Albums and Singles
While I love sociological criticism woven into art, if it is so deliberate that it is an album's strongest point, I'm bound to be disappointed after the first listen. That being said, Lovebomb is an extremely well-founded concept album about love and the expression of culturally specific social processes, an overarching thesis that I won't attempt to evaluate. Thaemlitz covers many angles and perspectives in his exploration of this ubiquitous emotion, using generally interesting, but sometimes run of the mill, electro-acoustic music.
The listener is first welcomed with some glitched-up, timestretched-out pop music; the meandering piano line and horribly distorted vocals reference music's obsession with "love." The track is convincing without coming off as overly clever. The second song, constructed from an African National Congress radio speech calling for "reactionary violence" against colonial oppressors, uses cut-up and lightly flanged spoken word in a result that slightly resembles the tonalities of traditional African singing. It's interesting at first but not something I'd like to listen to repetitively. "SDII" begins with Sammy Davis' computer-processed call for restraint following the assassination of Martin Luther King; then the dialogue fades into an immense, and slightly unsettling, drone. "Lovebomb" is incomprehensibly lush, progressing though gentle washes of synthesized and edited sound, orchestral samples, and chaotic walls of noise, without the music ever being truly interesting. The subsequent track contains some simple, plaintive piano melodies and a recording of Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, all subjected to digital manipulation so that they're entangled in a gentle web of sound, as it explores relationships between futurism, fascism, and racism. This piece probably contains the most music-driven emotional impact. "Signal Jamming Propaganda" combines the word "love," excerpted from various pop songs, for an amusingly schizophrenic, but quite expected, montage. The last few tracks continue to be thought-provoking in their perspective and material, but not so much in their music, and the final "bonus dance track" is catchy in a non sequitur and superficial sort of way. Lovebomb, as a whole, is good but inconsistent, and its sociological criticism is almost too overt for me, so in the end it is just a slightly above average electronic album. 
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- Steve Smith
- Albums and Singles
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- Steve Smith
- Albums and Singles
This two disc set is comprised of installations and live performances and, despite some interesting departures from Köner's recent output, is encumbered by its scope and formlessness.
It starts with some whispered vocals, which unfortunately are scattered throughout the entire recording, never really adding anything or fitting in. Köner moves through some very nice ambient themes over the course of the first disc, accompanied by a noisy background that sounds suspiciously like the radio crackle from Unerforschtes Gebiet, while mostly unprocessed environmental sounds—including birds, insects, and water—fill out the "topographie sonore." The rattling of branches provides a suitable, but almost overwhelming, counterpoint to the gracefully shifting melodies in the background. My main complaint is that, although there's enough activity and detail to keep me interested, the piece as a whole doesn't really reach out to the listener—it just exists formlessly on its own, without any need for effort or interpretation. Köner, as usual, synthesizes some great sounds, but this is not one of his better pieces. The variety on the second disc is a reward for patience, as these installation soundtracks feature better structure and more creative manipulation of field recordings. "Des Rives" is a refreshingly rhythmic track incorporating the sounds of traffic and a busy train station into an amalgamation of minimal techno beats and industrial noise. "Zyklop" opens with some filtered tones, popping noises, and what sounds like a few slow-running lawn sprinklers; after a few minutes a pure-sounding drone emerges and then plays a slight variant of the main progression of Köner's Daikan. Continuing with the variations on past work is "Tu, Sempre," which combines an apparently unaltered Unerforschtes Gebiet with some effective elements (something that sounds like a woodpecker) and some ineffective elements (more out of place French vocals). Despite the hypnotic low bass and layered rhythmic elements, the vocals ultimately succeed in annoying me by the track's end. The highlight of the album is the final track, another version of "Zyklop." Köner maxes-out the filtered static and radio noise to hide some slow volume swells and an incredibly epic melody filtered through distance and bad reception. Its brief emotional impact almost makes up for the previous 100 minutes, and then the lawn sprinklers and slight digital glitches take over again for the album's finale. I'm glad to see the incorporation of more elements into Köner's sound, but this recording could use some judicious editing, and is probably not essential.
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