HIS NAME IS ALIVE - Home Is In Your Head LP

Highly recommended.

In some ways, Michigan’s His Name Is Alive was a perfect fit for legendary label 4AD. The band, which has orbited for four decades around its only constant member, Warn Defever, shares in common with many artists on the label’s roster an affinity for texture and mood, not to mention the brand of gothic melancholy that runs from Dead Can Dance to Red House Painters. In other ways, however, His Name is Alive’s idiosyncratic Americana presents as something of an outlier alongside artists like Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil.

The first three His Name Is Alive albums set a particular template that Defever would variously abandon, revisit, and disrupt many times over the course of his long career, a career that would earn Defever a reputation as something of a polymath as comfortable covering Marion Brown as Charlie Feathers.

This working arrangement continues on 1991’s Home Is in Your Head, with Watts-Russell and Fryer remixing Defever’s 4-track basement recordings. Another crucial holdover from Livonia is vocalist and foil Karin Oliver, whose versatile voice provides the ideal vessel for Defever’s songs. Despite these similar circumstances, Home Is In Your Head is at once a darker and more ambitious affair than its predecessor, gesturing toward a broader palette of sounds and styles.

In an era increasingly unrestrained by the expectations of genre, His Name Is Alive’s postmodern pop sounds as daring and timeless as ever.