Customer Reviews

Xmmer

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His Name is Alive has gone from making dreamy 4AD music to acid-tinged indie pop to soul & R&B to alterna rock with some jazz thrown in it. Put together a best of HNIA mix (as I have done, more than once), pulling from all their different albums, and what comes out sounds like 3 or 4 different bands. Everything they've tried, they've done well. For their last two main albums, Detrola and this one, they sound like a combination of their Ft. Lake sound and their earliest stuff. Lovetta Pippin, the vocalist who sang most of the songs on the two soul albums, is out of the picture for the time being, the mic being handled for the time being by weird indie rock girls. The songs on this set sound pretty much like the stuff on Detrola, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it was all recorded around the same time. There are two songs that stand out (Go to Hell Mountain and How Dark is Your Dark Side), the first of which sounds like it could be an extension of the track, I Thought I Saw from Detrola. There is one song on which the band goes off on a Neil Young and Crazy Horse guitar-driven thing, very much Cowgirl in the Sand guitar work and very much like the Neil tangent they went on during the I Have Special Powers track off of the Last Night album. The other tracks on the album kinda run together, but in a nice way. If you liked Detrola you will like this.

By adding percolating afrobeat hints (no doubt from Warn Defever's tenure in Nomo) to the lo-fi 70s R'n'B and post-rock electronics of last year's "Detrola," HNIA continues to spin out a skein magically uniting their previously fractured 4AD dreampop and indie-folk discography with their so-called "difficult" albums "Someday My Blues Will Cover The Earth" and "Last Night."

Fuzzy classic rock guitar underpins songs that span from the creepy, icy "When You Fall For Someone" to springy plucks on "Come Out The Wilderness," to the irresistable, unpredictable pop grooves of "How Dark Is Your Dark Side" and "Come To Me." It is the sort of electric blues guitar playing -- anethema in indie rock -- that many bands would have to be forgiven for, but HNIA's main man Defever captures a magnetic urgency that comes across as spartan and recedes into the more complex arrangements of kalimba, acoustic strums, and strings.

Again, His Name Is Alive has managed to add new ingredients into the mix without letting novelty overcome innovation.

There is an initially baffling second-long gap ten seconds into "The Wolf Put His Mouth On Me," what at first seems to be a skip but in context is just the sort of genre-frustrating sonic happening that HNIA delights in, a flicker of musique concrete in a field of dizzying unconventional pop.

When Warren Defever's project His Name is Alive broke a half-decade hiatus with the release of DETROLA in 2006, there was much excitement and a belief that HNIA had returned to form. But curiously, the following album XMMER appeared in autumn 2007 to no fanfare and quickly passed out of print. XMMER continues in many ways the sound of its predecessor: vocals by Andy FM, sweet but vaguely threatening lyrics, and what one reviewer called "Fisher-Price instruments" grinding out ostinato-line melodies. XMMER is even the same length as DETROLA, 38 minutes and a handful of seconds, and has a similar pacing. There is, however, a greater variety here, provided by acoustic guitar strumming reminiscent of the singer-songwriter genre, or a bit of electric jamming. There's no much to say about XMMER except that it is solid pop with enough quirks to keep it interesting.

I've followed His Name Is Alive for well over a decade now and while Defever's music has had its ups and downs, he's never really disappointed me. I find XMMER just as fun as earlier albums and would recommend it to HNIA fans.