Artist: His Name Is Alive Release Date: 09/09/
1991
Label: 4AD records
Running time: 48m 20s
Featuring:
Warren Defever (Bass, Guitar,
Composer,
Sampling)
Karen Oliver (Vocal/Guitars),
Melissa Elliott (Songs/
Pencil Guitar),
Jymn Auge (Guitar, Songs),
Damian Lang (Drums,
Rainmaker, Crashers, Bone),
Denise James (Vocal, songs) ~ had a solo album on Poptones label in 2001.
~:~
Mixed by
Ivo Watts Russell (
This Mortal Coil) and
John Fryer (
Cocteau Twins).
Mastered by Gus Shaw.
Sleeve by
Vaughan Oliver and Dominic Davies.
Recorded at Warren's House,
Livonia, Detroit.
Background :
Home Is In Your Head (HIIYH) is probably one of the more dissonant, incoherent albums I've ever heard from an established commercial label. It's much less a record & more like a menagerie of ‘acoustic fragments’ ~ a sort of musical scrapbook or disjointed imagined soundtrack. It is, by times, overtly
melodramatic, even precious. However, the vocals and
guitar hooks deliver sufficient intensity to encourage a second listen. Slowly, all the pop music elements lurking behind the curtains of
theatricality and
art damage emerge. A buried human element claws its way out of the initial smoke of experimentalism; subsequently the album suddenly gets far more interesting. You can almost picture each tune, encased in a dusty glass case, warbling away by itself, over & over ~ listening to the album is a bit like a stroll through some weird
collector’s dusty attic.
The bands’ first full LP, '
Livonia' was recorded on a basement
home studio four-track, yet achieved remarkable depth considering Warren's sampling & Karen's vocals were the only elements keeping the songs grounded, almost everything else is swept away by Auge’s
wall of noise guitar fuzz. In the end, a set of fully distinct & traditionally structured three minute pop songs emerged from the gloom, buried in distortion and blurred with tape loops, as
4AD bands are wont to do. With this second album, however, the band completely abandons the eight song, threes minute each architecture for a record.
Does it rock? Can I put it on at a party? Can I bug out to it?
Not as such. No, probably a bad idea, unless you wanted it to end. Well, yes actually, but less in the dance & more in the medical
psychotic episode sense.
Then what’s it good for?
Firstly, it's a great reading record, at low volume, on a rainy day - comic books or dense 19th c. novels, for some reason seem to go particularly well with the music. Also, for listening (loud), while
driving (alone, for long distances, at night, in the summertime, with all the windows rolled down, on winding country back roads). Or, for states of chemical
knacker, flat on your back, lying on the porch, looking at stars.
Since most of the songs overlap, run together, carry a theme and/or act as
interludes, one either listens to the whole album straight through, or not at all. While it strays perilously close to ‘
concept album’- this would imply a unity which the record simply does not have.
Disjunction here, I would argue, may even be part of the point. The fact there’s a
triptych of tracks called
Songs of Schizophrenia is a big tip off to its overall atmposphere.
What’s it sound like though?
There are moments akin to a symphonic
rehearsal heard from the inside of a locked truck, dirges to be sung in hope of rain, campfire songs for ghost kids...there are snippets of imagined
soundtrack for
slow motion scenes...there are ticking clocks & neighbours’ answering machines heard faintly through walls. There are crunchy guitar solos and the occasional tortured scream which erupt, on occasion, mid-song. There are hypnotic acoustics and ethereal vocals. There are the voices of taunting children. There are flutes with
feedback.
Musical influences range from
Daniel Lanois’
infinite guitar, to Eno’s
discreet music/
Berlin phase with
Bowie, to
John Cage’s
VU tape loops, while the presence of a 50s radio pop music sensibility rides the undercurrent (particularly, I kid you not,
the Ink Spots Time Out For Tears,
The Beach Boys’ ballads, or
Phil Spector’s stuff with
the Chiffons). The overall effect is both shattered and shattering.
Anything else I need to know?
The last track isn't listed on the sleeve, and the tape ran out when they were recording it, so you don’t have a bad copy, like I thought when I first borrowed it on cassette from a friend (it was grade 11,
cassette tapes were still an acceptable media). And should your recognition spark on a first time listen to the album, around track 17, an echoing guitar instrumental (a la Lanois or
Michael Brook), then you may have 'attenuated soundtrack recognition syndrome' because a portion of the piece showed up inexplicably in, of all films,
Jerry Mcguire, during the epiphany/'nervous breakdown scene (have to give Crowe credit though, first time I heard this it tweaked me too - there’s something just perfectly despondent about the last chord change ). Also, hyper-creepy,
Svankmajer-esque animators, the
Quay Brothers (of ‘
The Street of Crocodiles’ fame) rendered
Are We Still Married? (and
Can’t Go Wrong Without You, from the following LP,
Mouth by Mouth) into shorts for
MTV in late ‘92.
Defever is also apparently a devout evangelical Christian - though this does not seem to figure at all in the music - apart from some occasional
religious imagery in the lyrics. Oh, and yes, that's a dead
giant squid on the album cover.
Say, for the sake of argument, I love the record? What else might I try?
If you like the particular sound specific to HIIYH, the preceding & following
His Name Is Alive work is an excellent bet, that being
Livonia (1990) &
Mouth By Mouth (1993), respectively. After that point, HNIA tend to drift and their LPs get increasingly scattershot (with the exception of the most recent,
Someday My Blues Will Cover The Earth, but which sounds nothing like their early material).
If you find yourself more a fan of the vocals, I can tell you the band
Love Spirals Downwards has a lead singer whose voice is a dead ringer for Oliver’s on this record (particularly on the solo songs, like The Well or Tempe). Older Cocteau Twins (circa
Treasure) and the recent ‘Smile’s OK’ release by
The Hope Blister also have the same heavily textured atmospherics and vocals of HIIYH.
If, on the other hand, you find the instrumental work more compelling, you might want to give
Flying Saucer Attack and/or
Movietone a shot ~ both bands do parallel pieces of home-taped, drone-heavy psychedelic folk.
The Songs:
1. Are You Coming Down This Weekend? - :18
~a prayer for visitation ~
2. Her Eyes Were Huge Things - 1:37
~warbling voices over echoing steel strings ~
3. The Charmer - 2:14
~distant ticking clocks, a lament & threat, ‘where has your head gone? i should nail it to her door...’ ~
4.
Hope Called in Sick - 1:36
~ Song of Schizophrenia: chimes broken by broken guitar ~
5. My Feathers Needed Cleaning - 2:27
~Song of Schizophrenia: tragedian chorus dirge - ‘we're going farther under/ to better hear the thunder’ - followed by dadaist chanting
~
6. The Well - 2:25
~Song of Schizophrenia: Eurydicean solo ~
7.
There's Something Between Us and He's Changing The Words - 1:20
~ bemoaning the infinite slippage of language ~
8. The Phoenix, a Pool of Ice - :50
~underwater ~
9. Are We Still Married? - 2:51
~ ‘kinda getting shot at / ‘kinda getting hurt ~
10. Put Your Finger in Your Eye - :44
~looped choral piece over 1982 industrial beat segue ~
11. Home Is in Your Head - 2:23
~brooding metal solo slowed to quarter-speed ~
12.
Why People Disappear - 4:17
~recorder piece played in a windstorm, answered by geese, and echoed in a well, giving way to Buddy Holly-sounding ballad for the invisible ~
13. Here Eyes Are Huge - 1:11
~steel-guitar solo ~
14. Save the Birds - :23
~ ...from the cats... ~
15.
Chances Are We Are Mad - 2:37
~ begins with wall of noise guitar scream, panning from speaker to speaker, leads into caustic lament - ‘and take the book & burn the pages & take the rage I have you for into something good’ - which segues back into guitar ~
16. Mesaclina - :48
~and more ghostly flutes ~
17.
Sitting Still Moving Still Staring Outlooking - 3:25
~ and another spectral infinite guitar solo ~
18. Very Bad a Bitter Hand - 3:02
~ forlornly dislodged duet - "This is your last life / take me where you want to go/ do you hear the footsteps?/ i'm walking in your shadow"
~
19.
Beautiful and Pointless - 2:25
~rising arc of strings followed by wavy steel guitar, buried lyrics ~
20. Tempe - 3:25
~ another spectral duet - ‘Meet you by the water/ promise not to drown you’ ~
21. Spirit and Body - 1:49
~the clock, ticking away urgently, returns again to be put down for a brief moment by a blaze of distorted guitar, only the ticking wins out, with a recorded mumble in the background - “i didn’t have to lie to you, I’m sure she’s dead, been gone a long time” ~
22. Love's a Fish Eye - 3:32
~ a jangly campfire bop which wraps up in a whorl of feedback & convulsive noise ~
23. Dreams Are of the Body - 1:01
~chant ~
24.
The Other Body - 1:41 *
interrupted*
~ A fragment of song, an innocent throw-off cut short that begins with a barely in audible (bur strange) ‘you have to wrap this thing around 'cause I can’t bend forward from the waist and sing?’ and ends mid-syllable in ‘with or without beyond.’~