Album Of The Week: Wovenhand Refractory Obdurate

The Swans reunion is an unambiguously great thing: A band of grizzled veterans channeling all the forces of darkness and playing half-hour symphonies to the abyss, staring all their deepest impulses in the face and submitting to them entirely. A Swans show, these days, is a scorching, purifying, life-affirming experience, and a new Swans album isn't much different. But even with all the power that the reconstituted Swans have at their fingertips, I've felt the slightest twinge of loss everytime I've heard their monolithic clang. That loss is this: At least for now, Angels Of Light are done. From the time Swans broke up to the time they got back together, frontman Michael Gira led Angels Of Light, a band that brought the enormity of that old Swans pound to old, ancestral American musics. Angels Of Light weren't a folk band or a country band, and their noise was nearly as elemental as that of Swans. But even at their grandest, they still had a weird campfire-folk simplicity to their songs, and that was a powerful thing. My first prolonged exposure to Gira was an Angels Of Light show in a tiny Baltimore room, back when Devendra Banhart was both an opening act and an Angel Of Light, and I left that show with my knees shaking. Gira -- barrel-chested, spotless white cowboy hat pulled low over his face -- came closer than any singer I've ever heard to Johnny Cash at his most mythic, and he did it while pushing the music of our collective American memory into dark, strange places. That band was something. But listening to Refractory Obdurate, the new Wovenhand album, that twinge of loss is becoming more of a distant echo. We might not have the Angels Of Light right now, but we do have Swans. And now, we have Wovenhand too.