HIS NAME IS ALIVE - Livonia 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.

It took some coaxing of Ivo Watts-Russell to convince the 4AD label boss to release 1990’s Livonia, His Name Is Alive’s debut album. Initially, Watts-Russell had rejected Defever’s demo tapes, finding them too disjointed and raw for 4AD. Undeterred, Defever continued sending revised and upgraded versions of the album to the label, and the persistence eventually paid off: Watts-Russell finally agreed to release the album with the stipulation that he and This Mortal Coil’s John Fryer would remix it. This remote meeting of transatlantic minds is audible on Livonia, which adds a lush, dreamy sheen to Defever’s homespun tapes, some of which date back as early as 1985.

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