The Angels Of Light - We Are Him (2LP)

Michael Gira’s last word under The Angels of Light banner lands with a kind of ritual clarity. We Are Him arrived in 2007 on Young God Records, a stark, lived-in summation of the song-first vision he’d been refining since Swans went quiet in the late 90s. If earlier Angels records felt like letters written in candlelight, this one sounds like he opened the windows and let the cold air in. The songs are lean, memorably shaped, and arranged with that old Gira blend of tenderness and threat. He produced it himself, as always, and it shows in the way every hit of drum and scrape of bow feels deliberate, like furniture placed just so in a room you immediately understand.

The music walks a rope between folk and something more menacing. Acoustic guitars sit at the center, but they’re ringed by lap steel, violin, harmonium, and percussion that moves like a procession. Gira’s baritone stays earthy and close, less a performance than a presence. He had been working closely with Akron/Family around this period, and that communal spirit hangs over these tracks. The choral swell that rises behind him on the title song feels like a small, stubborn congregation. It is a song that could soundtrack a march through tall grass, drums kicking up dust, voices lifting into a rough kind of grace.

What makes We Are Him so satisfying is how it distills the project’s strengths. Where New Mother and How I Loved You reveled in slow-blooming drama, here the writing is toughened up and direct. Melodies come quicker. Choruses bite. The arrangements bloom, then pull back. There is no wasted movement. You get the storytelling and the gallows humor, but also the pulse of a band breathing together. Longtime followers will clock the way Gira uses repetition like a spell. A line circles. A figure returns. By the time the song crests, you’re inside it.

It also reads now as the hinge between eras. Three years later Gira would resurrect Swans, and you can hear the seeds here. The sense of ceremony. The insistence on dynamics. The way voices become a crowd. Yet We Are Him never feels like a rehearsal for something else. It’s a fully realized album with its own weather. Stand anywhere in it and you can feel the sky change. The title track gets most of the love for good reason, but the record is full of moments that catch. A bell strikes at the right second. A violin saws at the edges of a waltz. A choir suddenly appears, bigger than the room.

Critics heard it. Reviews from places like AllMusic and Pitchfork singled out the sharpness of the writing and the weight of the performances, and fans tend to treat it as the high-water mark for Angels of Light. That tracks with how the album plays on a stereo. The low end is sturdy, the midrange warmly detailed, and the group vocals bloom in a way that rewards volume. If you collect The Angels of Light vinyl, this is the one you pull when you want the project crystallized in forty-odd minutes. If you’re hunting for We Are Him vinyl, it sits neatly next to the Swans reissues and those early Young God favorites, the sleeve slowly softening with use.

There’s also a personal tug to this record that keeps me coming back. Gira has always written like someone trying to will meaning into being, and here the faith is hard won. The songs feel weathered. They look you in the eye. When the voices gather around him, it reads as an act of community, not gloss. That’s part of why the album plays so well on turntables. The physicality of vinyl frames the wood and wire in the arrangements. If you need a copy, you can buy The Angels of Light records online pretty easily when a pressing pops up, though they don’t sit around long. The Angels of Light albums on vinyl have a way of disappearing from bins, even in a reliable Melbourne record store that never seems to miss a shipment of new arrivals. Crate diggers chasing vinyl records Australia wide know the drill. See it, grab it.

We Are Him is the kind of album that turns a project’s mission statement into a lived thing. No hedging, no spectacle for its own sake, just songs that stand up and do the work. Put it on and let the room change shape.