Record Exchange Boise

Reviews:

Michael Gira wears white fedoras and does the New York Times crossword on Brooklyn barstools. He looks like a noir villain, a man with squinting eyes and silk handkerchiefs, the sort who insists on patronizing conversation in the moments before he slits your throat. This is Gira as frontman for folkie outfit Angels of Light. But two decades ago, when he fronted sludge-punks the Swans, he was more of a Frankenstein, a fearsome figure whose lumbering gait was reflected in the band's saturnine rhythms. In the early '80s, flat broke, he once offered to chop off his pinky for the highest bidder. The offer went unanswered, but had the ransom been paid, he likely would have simply sewed another one on and pocketed the difference.

Gira's Angels of Light don't play Kingston Trio folk music, they play murder ballads, the sort that Harry Smith wandered the Appalachians to record for the Smithsonian. In his deep, hyper-masculine baritone, Gira sings of revenge and prison walls even as delicate string instruments circle his curses like buzzards. With backing by Akron/Family, a folkish outfit on Gira's Young God Records, Sing 'Other People' at times resembles Brian Wilson's Smile; its arrangements go many layers deep, even as the lyrics are choked by coal and death, lifetimes away from the Beach Boys' sandcastle dreams.

There are several high points on Sing 'Other People'. Musically, it's the band's most diverse album to date. And yet the record drags like a gimp mule. There's only so much Gira can do with his voice, and with the album's vocals-first mixing, it's easily the disc's most prominent sound. His ear has gravitated up the register from industrial grinds to bucolic chimes, but his timbre has not. And as the protagonists of those early folk songs often sang, there's only so much changing a man can do.