HIS NAME IS ALIVE - Mouth By Mouth 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.

By 1993’s Mouth By Mouth, Defever was ready for a change. Producing the album himself without label interference and adding a trio of singers to alternate with Oliver on lead vocals, Defever found himself deeply enmeshed in the recording and mixing process, having recently upgraded his home studio, Time Stereo. The result was the catchiest and most sprawling His Name Is Alive album to date, with a kaleidoscope of influences that now included jazz, minimalism, reggae, and garage rock. Future albums would find Defever expanding even further into retro pop, funk, and even prog metal amidst countless side projects and production work for artists ranging from Michael Hurley and Califone to The Stooges and Mdou Moctar.

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