His Name Is Alive — Home Is In Your Head (2024 Remaster)
Qobuz reissue review (Sept. 2024)
When it came time for His Name Is Alive to release a follow-up to 1990’s surprisingly successful Livonia (the album was only available in the U.S. as an import) neither Warren Defever (HNIA’s primary instigator) nor 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell found any reason to depart from the methodology that went into that debut’s creation. That process — Watts-Russell tightly editing and reconfiguring elements culled from Defever’s prodigious home-recording forays — not only allowed Livonia to instantly have a “4AD sound” (whatever that sound was, there’s no doubt that Watts-Russell was the one who defined it), but also allowed Defever’s particular musical vision to come into much sharper focus.
The 23 tracks on Home Is In Your Head had their source material in three cassettes of songs and sounds that Defever and an expanded cast of collaborators had recorded in his basement since the recording of Livonia; Watts-Russell picked the material he liked best then went about “seriously” editing them. So, while the process may have been similar, the result was quite different, especially since this material benefitted from the musical and compositional input of an expanded HNIA lineup (three vocalists, three additional guitarists, and a drummer). Thus, there are many more actual “songs” here, leaning heavily on acoustic/singer-songwriter elements (especially lots of big, reverb-drenched acoustic guitars) alongside the washes of noise and ambience that defined Livonia. It’s still noisy and weird and highly idiosyncratic, but there’s a pronounced confidence and clarity to the material. “Are We Still Married?” is less than three-minutes long, but is so well-composed and intricately performed, it could serve as a thesis statement for the entire output of HNIA. Other tracks like “Why People Disappear,” “Tempe,” and “The Well” are also impressive in their directness. (One of the best of these “straight-ahead” songs is “Dreams Are Of The Body,” a hidden, end-of-album bonus track that’s a gorgeous, bouncy singalong that suddenly ends because the cassette ran out while Defever was recording it.)
Of course, there are quite a few more amorphous, “song-adjacent” numbers like “Chances Are We Are Mad” and “Beautiful and Pointless” that flirt with traditional structures only to quickly abandon them, as well as lots of instrumental interstitials that range from mellow minimalism (the title track, “Sitting Still Moving Still Staring Out”) and Harold Budd-style ambience (“The Phoenix, A Pool of Ice”) to one, “Spirit and Body,” that sounds like a starter kit handed to every shoegaze band that came around in the next few years. This expanded edition also contains The Dirt Eaters EP, an even more song-focused release (originally intended for a separate band Defever was in with members of HNIA) that opens with a jaw-droppingly beautiful acoustic cover of Rainbow’s “Man on the Silver Mountain.” Demo, rehearsal, and live tracks shed a little light on the development of the album, but, given the unique production approach to these first two HNIA albums, it’s the final product that’s much more illuminating and essential.
