Beauty in Chaos Return with Fourth Album ‘Dancing With Angels,’ Share Video for “Made of Rain”

Instead of forging into another full album, Michael Ciravolo contemplated releasing a series of singles sketched around Beauty in Chaos (BIC), an assemblage of artists he’s collaborated with for nearly a decade or longer. As he regrouped with longtime collaborator producer Michael Rozon, the gears switched, and he started building the framework for the fourth Beauty in Chaos release, Dancing with Angels.

“That’s was me buying into the TikTok world of ‘No one’s going to have the attention span to listen to an album,” Ciravolo tells American Songwriter of his singles release. After nixing the idea of a series of singles, Ciravolo revisited a song called “Kiss Me (Goodbye),” a subtle nod to The Cure (“The Same Deep Water as You”) and the first track to make its way onto Dancing with Angels.

From there, Ciravolo wanted to reconnect with some of the artists who were part of the first two Beauty in Chaos releases, Finding Beauty in Chaos (2018) and the 2020 release The Storm Before the Calm, including The Mission’s Wayne Hussey, Ashton Nyte (The Awakening), Julian Shah-Tayler (The Singularity), and Holy Wars’ Kat Leon, along with newer collaborators The Bellwether Syndicate’s Will and Sarah Rose Faith and Cynthia Isabella, one half of Silence in the Snow.

A follow-up to the all-female-fronted album Behind the Veil from 2022, and six years since BIC’s debut, Dancing with Angels, captures something familiar and nostalgic, and is a newer wave of the musical collective Ciravolo formed in 2018. “I wanted to take a little step back into the first record that had more of the abrasive guitars, and more of a post-punk vibe and still touch on the dream pop and shoegaze,” says Ciravolo.

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“I never go into a record with a preconceived notion,” he adds. “When I pick up a guitar and step on a bunch of pedals, it usually sends us down a path, and for better or worse, me and Michael [Rozon] create something.”

Dancing with Angels, the title and album cover inspired by a painting from a talented German artist Maren Platzhoff opens on an alt-pop-tipped “Present Tense,” featuring William and Sarah Rose Faith and dreamier musings of “The Devil You Know,” a departure from the heaviness of Holy Wars for Leon, who previously appeared on BIC’s The Storm Before the Calm (“Stranger”).

“She’s got this kind of other side and I think that’s what she enjoys about working with BIC,” Ciravola says of Leon. “It lets her not be Kat Leon from Holy Wars. She definitely has something she wants to say, and she delivered it fantastically.”

On “Diving For Pearls,” Hussey, and his wife Cinthya, return with his fourth contribution to the BIC catalog and a song. “That may be the best song we’ve written together,” says Ciravolo of the unhurried ballad. “I think it’s about as close to a perfect song. I’m not being egotistical, but I can hear it with piano and some strings in the way The Mission does that.”

At first, Hussey didn’t have lyrics and perused his “old lyric notebooks” before his wife suggested tapping into a personal experience he had years earlier. “I won’t explain what or who the song is about, there’s no need for that,” said Hussey of the song in a previous statement. “I’ll just leave the listener to make up their own mind and take from it what they will.”

Vocalist Leo Luganskiy, frontman of metal band FOiRMODA and Strangelove, a tribute to Depeche Mode, pierces through the “Echoes and the Angels” while his Strangelove bandmate, singer, songwriter, and producer Shah-Tayler offers a suave new wave break mid-way through the album with “Kiss Me (Goodbye),” featuring drummer Pete Parada (The Offspring, Face to Face).

“Julian’s charismatic, and he’s kind of got that suave Bryan Ferry, David Sylvian thing going,” says Ciravolo of Shah-Tayler, who has collaborated with a number of artists, including Lana Del Rey, arranging her “Once Upon a Dream” for the 2014 film Maleficent. Shah-Tayler also fronts the Bowie tribute band The Band That Fell to Earth: A David Bowie Odyssey and recently released Hunger City, an album covering David Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs.

Newcomers to the BIC family, Isabella gives an ethereal pause with “Hollow.” Of Isabella, Ciravolo says, “She’s kind of Rachel Goswell Slowdive, Cocteau Twins with a wall of guitar.” Kommunity FK frontman Patrick Mata, new to Beauty in Chaos but an old friend of Ciravolo’s, joins on the Gothier “Holy Ground.”

Working with Mata on the live setting of the video, Ciravolo wanted to capture the essence of the underground dark wave music scene that was still thriving when he first moved to Los Angeles. “When we moved out here, bands still put fliers on poles,” remembers Ciravolo. “We would go up and down Sunset Boulevard and you’d be putting a flyer on a pole and guys like C.C. Deville from Poison were out there and Faster Pussycat and they were two completely different scenes, but everybody was just genuine and happy.”

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I am on the outside of surrender / Just another spark without a flame / And it feels like it might last forever sings longtime Beauty in Chaos collaborator Nyte, on album closer “Made of Rain.” The slow brooding track is a “song of hope,” says Nyte, who released his eighth solo album, Autumn’s Children in 2023 and is readying his 12th release with The Awakening.

“It is about getting up again and trying again,” adds Nyte, “despite the scars life can leave.”

Marking the anniversary of their first collaboration, the release of “Made of Rain,” and its accompanying video, directed by Fernando Corderofor Industrialism Films, was set on the same day as “Storm,” Nyte’s first collaboration with the band on Finding Beauty in Chaos.

Beauty Chaos is a collection of songs made with similar intentions, says Ciravolo. “Everybody puts their heart and soul into it, which makes it real,” he says. “No one is doing this for money. Thank God that none of us are doing it for that. I value everybody’s time. It’s not like you send them something and they open up their book lyrics and spout stuff out. People put their time and heart into it, and it’s a true collaboration.”

Aside from pieces of post-punk or goth, at its core, Ciravolo is also pleased that Beauty in Chaos has remained something that can’t be labeled.

“It’s not that we’re all over the place like ‘Here’s a country and western song and then a metal song,’” says Ciravolo. “But if I thumbed through my record collection, it’s pieces of what’s in that. It’s genuine, and I hope that comes through on the record. We’re not trying to be anything that we’re not. It’s just a collective of really unique artists coming together.”

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On the the deluxe version version of Dancing with Angels, Ciravolo further cements the eight tracks with instrumental interludes, “Halos,” along with a cover of Concert Blonde’s vampish 1990 single “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song).”

“I just thought that was a cool way of tying the songs together, like the way you would listen to ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ [Pink Floyd] or [The Cure’s] ‘Disintegration,” says Ciravolo of the added interludes. “It’s not comparing, but there’s a reason that the songs go that way. When the radio came on, you heard ‘Ziggy Stardust,’ and then you wanted to hear ‘Suffragette City’ come on right after it. There was a reason it flowed that way.”

Beauty in Chaos is always a collaborative effort, yet mostly carte blanche when it comes to the artists’ lyrics. “I’m really proud of the singers’ lyrics,” shares Ciravolo. “I’ve never had somebody write something and think ‘This is just bulls—t rock and roll party lyrics.’ There’s a deeper meaning.”

He adds, “It’s open-ended, where you can inject yourself in and it means something to you. I think those are the songs that last, the ones that are not obvious.”

Ciravolo isn’t sure where Beauty in Chaos will lead him next, but he’s sure it will be interesting. “It’s pretty surreal,” he says of the journey he’s had, so far, with the band.

“I can still listen to all the records and be really proud.”

Photo: Beauty in Chaos’ Michael Ciravolo (l) and Michael Rozon by Liz Ardman