Customer Reviews

Mouth By Mouth

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For any fan of 4AD bands or mellow Cadillica tunes this is a deal you can not pass up. Here the guitars know how to scale the walls, and dissonance is an art form. What distinguishes this album is the way the songs are alternatingly brilliant and witless, with a very high ratio of jewels to dross.

Track 3 is haunting, with harmony that will stop you cold. Heidi Berry has two great songs about rivers with similar vocals.

Track 4 is reminiscent of the Darling Buds, with guitars that are a bit timid, unable to caterwaul and make a solid wall of sound the way My Blood Valentine can.

Track 6 rumbles in like a rebuilt hot rod, with echoes of the Pixies, and vocals a la Sleater when Corin isn't screeching.

Track 9 is a jaunty instrumental that gets the guitars wailing and reminds me a bit of the Throwing Muses first album. Maybe that's just 'cause the song's named "Jack Rabbits".

Track 11 has punch, and vocals that get as close to angry as these angelic vocalists get. Which isn't very.

Tracks 15, & 16 dive back into the feedback, let it ricochet, sink, and lap at the buried guilt that all 4 AD bands seem to find as proprietary as the 23 envelope sleeve designs. The guitar pulses, hypnotizes.

The rest of the tracks sound like Area, with saccharine vocals drizzled over the top of it all.

This album has long been one of my favorites. It raises a ruckus in ways the Cocteau Twins & DCD cant, and doesn't bear Ivo's fingerprint of all glimmer, all sparkle. It'll haunt you, so snag it.

Don't pass this up. Just don't.

Of all the albums I picked up during the post-Nirvana alt-rock frenzy, "Mouth to Mouth" is one of the few that I still listen to with any regularity. Celestial 4AD/Cocteau Twins lushness meets prairie-Protestant American gothic starkness in this eclectic collection of short songs and dream sketches. Although most of the music is light and airy on the surface, there are hints of a Lynchian menace beneath the three-square checkered table cloth exterior. If this album recalls anything, it's Philip Ridley's brilliantly creepy "The Reflecting Skin", a film with a similar sense of rural midwestern weirdness.

This album I believe has been beneficial to my life. Me like mucho! Your band still is welcomed to dinner at my place. Have much to share!
Alpha.

Warren Defever stated in one interview that he wrote the songs for MOUTH BY MOUTH after realizing that people were going to actually listen to them. So, gone is the introversion and teenage angst of LIVONIA and HOME IS IN YOUR HEAD, but the idiosyncracies have just begun.

His Name is Alive's body of work carries the same mood and feel over several different musical styles, and the jump from the dreary and oppressive HOME IS IN YOUR HEAD to the friendly pop of MxM is the widest in Warren Defever's 15 years of working under His Name is Alive. It was with MxM that HNIA finally became a "real band," and with Trey Many, HNIA had a dedicated drummer that was actually in most of the songs.

MxM, however, is not totally a His Name is Alive record. About half of the songs were written for Melissa Eliot's band The Dirt Eaters, who is for the most part the same people as His Name is Alive. Melissa and Warren's songs, however, share a common weirdness that makes the record a unified whole.

The highlights include "Lip," "Cornfield," and the haunting "Sort Of." HNIA's cover of Chilton's "Blue Moon" is pleasant, but I can't help but feel that a Warren-written song in its place would have been better.

Warren and Melissa get literary in this album, "Sort Of" is taken from a passage by William Faulker. Several other songs include lines from the poetry of Theodore Roethke.

In the end, however, MxM deserves three stars. Warren made too many compromises in this one, and it turned out for the worse. Even though he continued to collaborate with others in the albums after MxM, at least then he kept control and sustained that standard Warren inexplicable creativity. This may be HNIA's worst album, and I think it should wait until you have already heard the sweeping wonder of LIVONIA or the oldie-robot-funk of FT. LAKE.

Incidentally, I would recommend getting the UK import edition of MxM, as it contains "The Homesick Waltz," one of the best songs HNIA has ever done.