Mike Gira, the former singer of the Swans, is a musical dramatist of the distortion of personality, a nihilistic and hallucinatory poet of emptiness, a hidden claustrophobe who still elevates the lofty “Reed-ian” mantra of moral degradation. Within the realm of rock music, Gira is one of the great prophets of the apocalypse.

Mike Gira began his career as a singer-songwriter with Drainland (Alternative Tentacles, 1995). In reality, the high priest of the Swans is merely continuing the long private mass he has been officiating since he began playing.
Once again, the album is a parade of the inner ghosts of this psychoanalytic case, desperately searching for cathartic experiences. In Where Does Your Body Begin, he seems like Leonard Cohen in a cemetery, waiting to be resurrected. In Your Naked Body, he appears as Syd Barrett in purgatory, awaiting the final judgment. Perhaps the most authentic Gira is in Unreal, where he intones the gloomiest “om” over a background of Tibetan gargling from Jarboe. The most unusual Gira appears in Fan Letter, describing with grim sarcasm, in a carnival-like nightmare, the stream of consciousness of a psychotic criminal. In this festival of tortured atmospheres (and harmonies), often with Gira alone reciting in delirium over a backdrop of noise, the music sometimes dips in tone, as if sucked into an emotional black hole. Yet many of his stories are worthy of a Hitchcock thriller. In the end, there remains the sense that Gira is still searching for himself. As one of his lines asks, “What does a body mean?”
His songs emerge at the crossroads of Hitchcock thrillers, Biblical parables, and funeral sermons.

The next project is called Body Lovers, and the album Number One Of Three (Young God, 1998) continues in that direction. Body Lovers is electronic music without vocals. Sounds were produced by manipulating a variety of instruments, from mandolins to accordions. In the end, only these faceless sound flows, these shadows of music, these boundless voids remain. Gira, in short, abandoned the role of storyteller of the afterlife and embraced that of an acoustics scholar. But in truth, Gira changed everything to change nothing: the atmosphere is exactly the same as the early Swans albums—depressing and oppressive. Every second exhales an overwhelming sense of existential nausea.
1 (fourteen minutes) is the most challenging manifesto of this hybrid of industrial, ambient, and gothic music: the piece begins static, like the most trivial of British ambient experiments (a drone ad libitum), but slowly grows into a heap of buzzing until it becomes a brutal vibration reminiscent of the worst Foetus and Neu.
At that point, emotions rise, though they are difficult to decipher. In 2, the accordion murmurs an anemic melody, then yields to guitar and trumpet, engaging in a subdued duet of slightly warmer melodies. 5 has the pace of a medieval and Middle Eastern ballad, but the Enya-like vocals merely repeat a solfeggio, leaving the vision wrapped in a supernatural fog. The endlessly sustained trumpets of 3 (ten minutes) recall the most languid moments of Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom, his tender cosmic weltanschauung. Gradually, a martial rhythm emerges, and the overlapping trumpets reveal they are playing a funeral fanfare. The solemn chime of 9 has something Japanese about it, but once again, whatever it is remains unresolved: only a cryptic infant wail breaks through the latex. A couple of very slow, hypnotic solo guitar ballads make the agenda of this anonymous music even darker.
4 and 6 are pure avant-garde pieces, composed by layering piano clusters, Ummagumma-style noise (Pink Floyd), psychedelic drones, and so on.
Not only monumental but also superhumanly ambitious, the album marks the beginning of another career for Gira—that of avant-garde composer. The mind bows to the experimenter’s feat, but the heart remains with the cursed singer-songwriter’s poems, and therefore with

Gira summarized the fundamental contradiction of the average rock fan in one phrase: “He needs to feel like a rebel for a couple of years before turning into a wage-slave.” And his music is nothing more than a heartfelt elegy for that population of the defeated. “I want power / I’ll wash America with blood”: he could be the next serial killer, the next possessed preacher who drags his followers into a gigantic collective sacrifice. He is the greatest scholar and prophet of the dark forces of self-destruction.

Body Haters is the complementary project to Body Lovers. The first album (Young God, 1998), released in a limited edition of 2,000 copies, contains a single long track (33:14) that Gira created using found sounds and studio artifices, a demanding exercise in electronic music, not so much ambient as subliminal.

Body Lovers/ Body Haters (Young God, 2005) collects the two albums.

Angels Of Light, Gira's new project, is basically the alter ego of Body Haters: Body Haters is ambient/atmospheric, Angels of Light is orchestral songs (the two together yield late Swans). New Mother (Young God, 1999) features contributions by German guitarist Christoph Hahn, drummer Phil Puleo (Cop Shoot Cop), Keyboardist Bill Rieflin (Ministry, NIN, Revolting Cocks), singer Michelle Amar (Sulphur), percussionists Thor Harris (Lisa Germano) and Larry Mullins (Iggy Pop), bass player Bill Bronson (Gunga Din), cellist Julia Kent (Rasputina), plus Chris Griffin (dobro, mandolin, dulcimer, banjo), Joe McGinty (piano), Hahn Rowe (violin), Kurt Ralske (flugelhorn), Martin Bisi (organ)...
Gira sings his stories of redemption in a style not too different from Nick Cave's most obsessed persona (as in the emphatic gospel of Praise Your Name, in the country melodrama of Shame), and the baroque background sounds like a cross between Dead Can Dance (the extended Angels Of Light) and a chamber orchestra performing an exoteric requiem (The Man with The Silver Tongue). As a folksinger, Gira turns his gothic mood into a stark Fraudian soliloquy, that swings between Nick Drake's anemia (New Mother), Chris Isaak's depression (Inner Female) and Syd Barrett's fairy tales (The Garden Hides The Jewel).

The Somniloquist (Young God, 2000) contains five horror stories that Gira recites in his usual macabre tone. The lyrics indulge in all sorts of psychotic aberrations, but without adequate musical accompaniment a bad story is only a bad story.

Angels Of Light's How I Loved You (Young God, 2001) is a concept album devoted to sex. The cycle follows the protagonist's psychology as it floats from an eden of pure love (the Leonard Cohen-esque Evangeline as well as Untitle Love Song, that borrows the pace from Neil Young's Harvest) to an infernal depth of perversion and depravity (the slow lengthy dirge New York Girls) via the twelve-minute nervous breakdown of New City In The Future (a suspenseful catatonic trance imploding into a pounding maelstrom of laments). Gira applies the same structure over and over again: songs start slow and shy, tender and romantic, then build up with almost ferocious impetus until they turn into terrifying nightmares.
Gira's ideal landscape is a purgatory where he suffers unspeakable existential pain (the driving and exalted My True Body, the album's emotional zenith, the atmospheric My Suicide, that weaves Lou Reed and Warren Zevon into the most memorable tune of the album, Jennifer's Sorry, the album's emotional nadir) but never dies. Kid Congo Powers and Bliss Blood (Pain Teens) lend a hand. Song For Nico pays tribute to one of his muses.
Gira's limit is precisely what he thinks is his forte: the lyrics. When he stretches the music to twelve minutes, as he does in Two Women, to accomodate his lyrics, without adequately supporting them with the arrangements, the song simply sounds overlong.

Gira lost his inspiration a while back, and What We Did (Young God, 2002), a collaboration with Dan Matz of Windsor For The Derby, is a bold stab at reinventing his career. Mostly, the duo indulges in lengthy, trancey, droning dirges that substitute hypnosis for substance. Is Was and 17 Hours sound like ambient remixes of early Doors, Pink Floyd and Velvet Underground, when sound had a strong psychological and exoteric undercurrent. Together the two set up an orchestra of acoustic and electric guitars, bass guitar, organ, piano, synthesizer, drums, harmonica, banjo and vocals (treated virtually like another instrument). A fistful of tracks straddle the line between Cowboy Junkies' mournful dirge, Nico's tragic lament and Current 93's apocalyptic folk: Pacing the Locks, Lines, Brown Eyes, Waiting Beside Viragio, Forcing Mary, Sunflower, The Brightest Star. To Gira's credit, Matz is mainly in charge of lyrics and vocals. However, Windsor's post-rock ambient music is all over the map, a sign that Matz is at least a major influence on Gira's new phase.

Gira's magniloquence perhaps found its ideal setting on Angels of Light's Everything Is Good Here Please Come Home (Young God, 2003), a collection of odes that explore at the same time the personal, historical and political dimensions. The mood ranges from pensive to satanic. On one hand Gira's unique take on apocalyptic folk (Palisades, that opens as a paean for folk guitar and music-box piano and ends as a gospel hymn, Kosinsky with raga-like strumming and Irish fiddle, the Greek-Slavic Wedding) and on Nico's stately, pagan, ancestral lied (hardly matched in What You Were and the trancey What Will Come) concocts a sense of insoluble mystery and inevitable decay. On the other hand, the more robust rhythms and textures of All Souls' Rising (a Velvet Underground-ian boogie replete with vintage Lou Reed-ian snarl), Rose of Los Angeles (in insistent bacchanal that sounds like a demonic dance), and Sunset Park (a merry-go-round of vocal harmonies reminiscent of Tibetan monks), paint a bleak, tormented atmosphere and are emblematic of a quest that is both existential and metaphysical. The album is a far cry from Gira's artistic peaks. While there are interesting songs, it lacks the depth, magic and charm of his masterpieces, and it includes several (verbose) songs that should have been left in the drawer.

Angels Of Light's fourth album, Sing Other People (Young God, 2005), is Gira on narcotics, a cathartic return to psychedelic folk-rock. As usual, Gira spins his yarns in his brooding apocalyptic tone but this time neither the music nor the lyrics match the intensity of the voice. Thus the focus is on the melodies (only Lena's Song and Dawn are truly worth it) and the eccentric sounds (My Friend Thor) crafted jointly with Akron/Family.

Gira contributed four original songs (including The Provider and One for Hope) and a cover to Akron/Family & Angels Of Light (Young God, 2005), a collaboration with Akron/Family.

Gira continued to move closer to conventional adult songwriting on We Are Him (Young God, 2007). His sermons range from passionate (My Brother's Man) to funereal (Promise of Water) and rarely repeat themselves. The musical peak might be Black River Song, that boasts a somewhat intricate dynamics, but it's the brief and facile Sunflower's Here To Stay that stands out. Gira has focused too much on the lyrics and too little on the music (the backup female singers are the notable exception). The themes of the songs are not the most interesting, to start with. And, like all songwriters, he forgets that he is no William Shakespeare. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the longest songs are also the least impressive. If one removes those four songs that approach the six minute mark, the album is not bad at all.