Akron/Family
(Young God) Used CD $3.00 (Out-of-stock)
“Opaque psych-folk weirdness [from 2005] with each of the Brooklyn band’s four principal members receiv[ing] a ‘bric-a-brac’ credit next to the more conventional listings for guitar, piano, melodica, glockenspiel, and percussion…. Unidentifiable noises have a way of splattering suddenly across the album’s plaintive acoustics…. melding … animalistic percussion, layered voices, pleading melody, and hints of electronic noisemaking to the lo-fi aesthetic….”
Love Is Simple
(Young God) Used CD + DVD $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Chaos, rock action, tribal bongo-banging, sentimental sing-alongs and pop gems galore. From 2007. Sealed
We Are Him
(Young God) Used CD $6.00
On the sixth and “most engaging [of Michael Gira’s albums] as Angels of Light,” according to Pitchfork, “he’s backed by one of the most impressive guest lists of the year (Akron/Family providing the basic tracks, plus new friends or longtime collaborators Larkin Grimm, David Garland, and Bill Rieflin)…, [and has] rarely sounded this foreboding: Prodded by a scathing, raw violin drone and a daring chorus of sirens, it’s an escalating dirge for the collapse of society, full of floods, blood and mouths too stupid to scream. Beneath an electric guitar twitter, heavy drums and furious strings…, Gira hands down … imprecations.” Digipak edition from 2007
How I Loved You
(Young God) Used CD $10.00
Far from M. Gira’s usual terrain of brute excess and into a zone of languid reverie, bittersweet longing, this 2001 album is “largely acoustic with a palette of oblique electronic washes and blurred sonic architectures applied for cavernous, orchestral atmosphere. Its elegance is seductive.” With Gira on vocals, guitars, and effects; Christoph Hahn on lap and electric guitars; Lawrence Mullins on percussion; Dana Shecter on bass and piano; Birgit-Cassis Staudt on accordion, piano, and Casio; and Thor Harris on dulcimer and piano, joined by Bliss Blood on vocals and Kid Congo Powers on electric guitar. Digipak. Sealed.
Sing Other People
(Young God) Used CD $8.00
Pitchfork calls this 2005 album “a gutsy record. It maintains the band’s lo-fi intimacy while expanding its breadth to include back-up singing and more voluminous instrumentation. Fans of Everything Is Good Here / Please Come Home, the Angels’ tumultuous 2003 stab at lysergic goth-folk, shouldn’t be faulted for thinking they’re hearing a different band altogether. Part of this metamorphosis can be attributed to the assistance of fellow Young God signees Akron/Family. ‘Lena’s Song’ stakes Michael Gira’s booming baritone against a glistening backdrop of nylon-string plucking, fretless bass, glockenspiel, and a chipper Beach Boys-esque vocal harmony. The song proves Angels of Light capable of clarity and levity…. ‘My Friend Thor’ is as subtle an act of self-immolation as a club to the head from its namesake: It starts acoustic, with a laconic Gira following the rigid outline of his strumming, before he’s blindsided by a burbling gamelan orchestra. The detour moves the song from the sound of stark isolation to a full-on fireside jamboree, replete with a veritable tabernacle-full of backup vocalists.” Digipak
New Mother
(Young God) Used CD $8.00
“M. Gira continues with his intentional break from Swans. Anything but a softening of his art…, New Mother instead … experiment[s] even further, concentrating on acoustic guitar songs accompanied by a variety of musicians…. The general feel of the entire record draws on a juxtaposition of lush ’60s American and European pop orchestration (the use of a banjo inevitably recalls Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks) with often stark, ominous recordings and arrangements…, creating a marvelous.…” Digipak.
Black Babies
(Young God) Used CD $4.00
A UK-only EP from 2003, with six hushed and intimate lo-fi tracks otherwise unavailable plus two from Oh Me Oh My...The Way The Day Goes By The Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs Of The Christmas Spirit.
Oh Me Oh My...The Way The Day Goes By The Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs Of The Christmas Spirit
(Young God) Used CD $4.00
“The first thing that strikes you about Devendra Banhart is his utterly unique and soft voice, which seems a mix of Nick Drake and Marc Bolan…. Originally recorded on shoddy and broken four-track recorders, the songs have a … roughness and audible hiss on nearly all of them…. Lyrically they are quite odd and occasionally nonsensical…. A lot of the songs appear to be not fully realized, but perhaps that’s the beauty of them.” From 2002
Niño Rojo
(Young God) Used CD $6.00
“A songwriter of guileless vision, Banhart’s unaffected aesthetic is etched in the ether of mysterious traditional and psychedelic folk musics from the British Isles and in an America that disappeared the first time in the 1930s with the Dust Bowl and for the second time in the grimness of mid-’70s determinism in the shadows of post-Vietnam shame and malaise. His songs don’t hearken back so much as remind us of what we no longer possess as a culture. His songs are spiritual, terminally unhip, with labyrinthine grown-up melodies and the keen unsullied wisdom of children.” Digipak. Sealed
Rejoicing In The Hands
(Young God) Used CD $7.00
Unlike Banhart’s debut, his 2004 second album “was professionally recorded, and a few tracks feature … Angels of Light alums Thor Harris, Joe McGinty and Siobahn Duffy,” explains Pitchfork. “It’s far from slick, though, reeking of rustic, homemade charm.” With singing and writing both surpassing Oh Me Oh My, “his songs no longer veer into bizarro cadences or witchy vocal overdubs.” Rather than get pigeonholed as a “lo-fi eccentric…, the singer’s range of expression (and surprising delicacy) [gets] full justice.” Sealed
34:13
(Young God) Used CD $10.00
The Body Haters is the crude, arrhythmic and elemental evil sister of The Body Lovers, another instrumental project by Swans’ Michael Gira. Constructed entirely from raw field recordings and primitive cassette loops, 34:13 is a rude chunk of electronic concrète, simultaneously abstract and visceral. Edition of 2000.
I Am Singing To You From My Room
(Young God) Used CD $50.00
One installment in Gira’s ongoing series of home recordings songs — nice and pleasant renditions of various songs from his solo career and the Angels of Light catalog, plus new tracks and sketches. The tone is warm and inviting, even on occasions when the music and/or lyrics get decidedly dark. In a card envelope with woodblock print and hand lettering by the artist. Includes lyric sheet and personal thank-you note.
Solo Recordings At Home
(Young God) CDR $65.00
With an emphasis on Gira’s voice and guitar only (an exception being the live recording “Irish Queen”), the 2001 performances here are astonishingly direct. His singing “balances command with empathy, cracked and tender at once,” according to All Music Guide. “His guitar playing similarly … shift[s] on a dime from sudden, brusque runs to gentler, steady fingerpicking, evoking everything from strung-out rural blues to Nick Drake’s hushed emptiness.” The other exception is “God’s Servant,” a fully orchestrated outtake from Angels of Light’s New Mother sessions. Swans diehards will also want to hear the evocative reworking of “Love Will Save You” from White Light From the Mouth of Infinity and the wracked take on The Burning World’s “I Remember Who You Are,” which “easily trump[s] the smothered, smoothed-out production of the original.”
Living ’02
(Young God) CDR $175.00
Eleven tracks recorded by an audience member in Portugal 2002. “Gira’s sense of timing and delivery,” say All Music Guide, are sharp, shifting easily and perfectly “between wrenching calls to the sky and carefully focused, close-to-the-mic words.” “God Damn the Sun” sounds forlorn and heart-touching. “Meanwhile, the quiet but tense arrangement of ‘Nations’ is punctuated by … harrowing vocals, high-pitched and powerful, and even those are trumped by the blasting conclusion of ‘All Souls Rising,’ Gira sounding on the verge of trashing both his guitar and vocal cords.” #000/350
Forever Burned
(Young God) Used CD $100.00
The entire Burning World album that was released in 1989, plus the songs from White Light From The Mouth of Infinity, Love of Life and various B-Sides that were not included on Various Failures. Signed by M. Gira. From 2003
Soundtracks For The Blind
(Young God - YG01) 2xCD $30.00
(Young God - YG01) Used 2xCD $10.00
Ten actual songs nestled among the found-soundscapes, ambient decompositions and twisted electronic noises that constitute the album’s remaining sixteen fragments. Soundtracks’ sheer length (two-and-a-half hours) and immensity are its own best explanation.
New CD is embossed digipak from 1996.
Used CD is second edition in single-width jewelcase from 2002.
Swans Are Dead
(Young God) Used CD $45.00
Performances from 1995’s Great Annihilator tour (with Larry Mullins, Vudi, and Joe Goldring joining M. Gira, Jarboe, Kris Force, and Dave Ouimet) and the tour from 1997 (with Clinton Steele, Bill Bronson, and Phil Puleo). The 1995 disc is taken wholly from a show in Norway, mixing a variety of then-unreleased tunes with both solo and Swans material. The 1997 disc collects tracks from New York, Atlanta and Europe. Throughout both discs, the audiences are loudly and happily appreciative of the group’s astonishing fire. 1998 edition in digipak. Sealed
My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky
(Young God - YG43X) Used 2xCD $15.00
Epic soul-crushery from 2010 that moves through pastoral terrain onto ever-ascending monotonal grooves. A filmic-folk idyll featuring Devendra Banhart on lead vocal abruptly shifts to cataclysm, and is followed by more airplane-taking-off ascensions, art songs and lethal sonic pummeling. With bonus disc of raw material compiled, mangled, edited, and re-arranged.
Various Failures
(Young God) Used 2xCD $30.00
Tracks from 1988 to 1992, ranging from delicate, acoustic ballads with accompanying strings to bombastic Phil Spector-influenced arrangements, to cinematic sound collages with found vocal narrations, all unified by Swans essential intensity of feeling. This double-CD collects the best of the material released previously on their Love Will Tear Us Apart 12-inch (Caroline 1988), The Burning World album and its various singles (UNI 1989), the World of Skin album 10 Songs For Another World (Young God 1990), White Light From The Mouth of Infinity (Young God 1990/91), and the Love of Life album and its various singles (Young God 1992). Includes “Love Will Tear Us Apart (Jarboe Version)” and “New Mind (Acoustic Version),” both removed from later editions. Digipak edition
Children Of God / World Of Skin
(Young God) Used 2xCD $10.00
By 1986 Swans had run its course with the physical assault of sound, so Michael Gira pushed the music into unfamiliar territory. Recording in an old isolated medieval sawmill in Cornwall, England, Jarboe’s presence came to the fore as a presence. Children Of God was a major turning point for Swans; around the same time, Jarboe and Gira did two records under the name World Of Skin, a large assortment from which is included on the second disc of this 2008 reissue.
Various Failures
(Young God) Used 2xCD $5.00 (Out-of-stock)
Tracks from 1988 to 1992, ranging from delicate, acoustic ballads with accompanying strings to bombastic Phil Spector-influenced arrangements, to cinematic sound collages with found vocal narrations, all unified by Swans essential intensity of feeling. This double-CD collects the best of the material released previously on their Love Will Tear Us Apart 12-inch (Caroline 1988), The Burning World album and its various singles (UNI 1989), the World of Skin album 10 Songs For Another World (Young God 1990), White Light From The Mouth of Infinity (Young God 1990/91), and the Love of Life album and its various singles (Young God 1992). Includes “Love Will Tear Us Apart (Jarboe Version)” and “New Mind (Acoustic Version),” both removed from later editions. Jewelbox edition. Some discoloration on the front cover.