Michael Gira – ‘Gira’ is pronounced as in ‘giraffe’ without the ‘ffe’ – is from the strum and holler school of rock.
On stage in Ravenna, his elegant, dignified bearing together with his courteous stage manners belie the fact that his songs are packed with raw emotion and barely concealed rage.
He sings of blood , pain, sin, death, desire and, if you’re lucky, brief glimpses of redemption.
Gira’s aura and passion would make him an highly effective hellfire preacher with the capacity to terrorise a rapt congregation. Fortunately for us he’s on the side of the sinners of the world.
The songs struck me as not so much composed as wrenched from the dark depths of his psyche then thrust into the cold light of day, still pulsing and hurting.
His baritone singing voice can best be described as full blooded. What he lacked in vocal range he more than made up for with the power and directness of the delivery. When words failed he yelped and howled very effectively.
A tune he described as a quiet song (Reeling The Liars In) contains lines about collecting skin and eating tongues. The volume may not be loud but the imagery most certainly is.
He played ten songs in all – see Last.fm here for the set list.
The two best songs he played were ‘Promise of Water’ and ‘Blind’. The latter he introduced as an “ancient ‘Swans’ song” and in it the first person narrator (a younger version of Gira himself?) describes an unwillingness to face up to the violence and suffering he witnesses. Two lines that stood out for me were “I created a lie” and “I was strong, clear-minded and blind”. The second line later switches ‘clear-minded’ to ‘self deluded’.
Promise Of Water combines a strong portentious beat with some more vivid imagery, this time of howling dogs and streets filled with blood. The song doesn’t lend itself to a tidy synopsis (in other words, I have no idea what it was about!) but it’s fair to assume he was singing about more than feeling a little thirsty.
After an hour on stage he bid us farewell saying: “I’d like to leave it there if I may – I feel I’ve done the best that I can possibly do”.
It was just about the right length for music of this intensity. While Gira is not an artist whose records I could imagine listening to a lot, I was impressed by his stage presence and enjoyed the honesty of his performance.
I also heard Blind for the first time this year, on the Swans two disc Various Failures. Haven’t had that kind of experience of a single song in couple of years. What was the solo version like? did he just pick the guitar part (as in Swans version) or make more of a wash with some strums?
It is one of those songs that once heard, never forgotten. I hadn’t heard the original of ‘Blind’ before the show so I didn’t make any kind of comparison at the time. It seemed to me that his live version was pretty much a strum and holler affair because it was the power of the words that struck home rather than any nifty arrangement.