Angels of Light: Flashes of Brilliance

"I hate you for your love/I hate you for your sex" is not exactly the kind of line you'd expect from a group called Angels of Light -- unless you know that the band's archangel is a self-styled Lucifer named Michael Gira who led the New York City-based group Swans. Under Gira's leadership, Swans toiled for some 15 years in rock's dark underbelly. The band's early songs, like "Raping a Slave," were lyrical and musical explorations of man's ugly nature. And sometimes the ugly nature of God.

Initially Gira's Swans were a piledriver, a coiled fist of guitars, drums, sampler keyboards, and bass all smashing down on the same beat. Because of Swans' extreme amplification, the sound was absolutely assaultive -- and about as fresh and exciting as new rock got in the mid '80s. Gira added to the mix a voice that alternated between scowling and pained, and a malevolent, self-loathing stage presence. Stripped to the waist and drooling, eyes rolled back into his head, he looked like a hanged man somehow reanimated.

A week ago Friday at the Middle East, Gira seemed a more refined artiste -- his short hair matching the tasteful conservativism of his brown shirt, pants, and suspenders. He sat at center stage in a chair with an acoustic guitar across his lap, robust save for a persistent cough he ascribed to two and a half months of touring.

His ironically named Angels of Light also proved a more refined outfit. By the time Swans disbanded, Gira's conception had been fortified by a wall of sound -- layers of distortion and harmony built from keyboards, samplers, effects-laden guitars, percussion, and various instruments imported from Asian and European folk musics. It had grown to include expansive melodies, too. At the Middle East and on the Angels' debut, New Mother (Young God), melodies were the first order of biz. Gira's six-string formed the spine of his new songs, which twisted along his favored themes of despair, love, and sex-as-power-and-panacea.

Often they did so beautifully. Gira has mastered a crooning variation on the dry delivery perfected by fellow New Yorker Lou Reed. And on numbers like "Praise Your Name," an ode to female power and energy, the drive of his downstroked guitar chords was embraced by subtle shades of steel guitar, a pleasing accordion, and bass used as a generator of low tones more so than of notes, which added emotional weight to his provocative lyrics. (Lines like, "You're glorious! So rise above the garbage. Leave me where I fall.")

Gira's recent writing is full of the kind of images that have long been his forte. In "Fear of Death (Love Me Now)" -- as he sang of an interrupted hanging (or perhaps auto-eroticism), crawling naked and bloody down a hall, and emotional vampirism -- the accordion in particular, playing a wheezy and skewed melody, helped transform the tale into a Fellini-esque nightmare. The best moments of the night, however, came when spare details like accordion lines, whispers of slide guitar, and gently thrumming bass were devoured by volume and energy -- the times when the entire band seized upon a passage and wailed at full tilt, creating a powerful swirl of sound.

Too often, though, Gira let the acoustic bedrock dictate the dynamics of the songs. There weren't enough sonic shifts in the music, and there wasn't enough of the excitement that came when his skilled ensemble fully applied themselves. Certainly there were passages of stirring lyric and musical power, especially in the performance's energized opening songs and encore numbers. But the Angels of Light's stretches of on-stage lifelessness limited Gira's brilliance to flashes.

-- Ted Drozdowski