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For any musician that has had a career as long and as important as Michael Gira, keeping up the momentum must be an almost overwhelming task. As if the early Angels of Light material wasn’t enough of a departure from Swans, successive albums and tours have seen Gira stripping his sound and his songs down to a rootsy, folk-fueled core that is both more immediate and more direct than most of his back catalogue. While the last Angels of Light full length left me feeling that I’d peeked a bit too closely in on the man behind the curtain, Gira’s portion of the latest split release with Akron/Family accomplishes more of that uneasy closeness and it’s his portion of the disc that I’m most apt to skip.
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