His Name Is Alive — Mouth By Mouth (2024 Remaster)
Qobuz reissue review (Sept. 2024)
Livonia was the sound of His Name Is Alive’s Warren Defever — an innovative and unique, if compulsive, home recording artist — having his ideas clarified and strengthened by an empathetic and atmosphere-minded label boss (4AD’s Ivo Watts-Russell). The second HNIA album, Home Is In Your Head, was the sound of that collaboration expanding to include more players and contributors in Defever’s home studio, with Watts-Russell still wielding a heavy editing hand. For the third 4AD album by His Name Is Alive, not only was Watts-Russell less hands-on in its production (though still quite involved), but the band had actually become a band, in the sense that all of its members were contributing quite regularly to the project. In fact, the band had actually grown to be two bands: His Name Is Alive and The Dirt Eaters, a more song-oriented indie rock group that was nurtured by Defever, but was led by guitarist Melissa Elliot. Their contributions to Home Is In Your Head helped bring HNIA’s sound into sharper focus, especially on the album’s follow-up EP The Dirt Eaters (which, frankly, should have been credited to The Dirt Eaters, rather than HNIA). The two groups’ work was intended for separate releases, but was ultimately collated together for Mouth By Mouth by Watts-Russell, whose primary contribution was sequencing the best material into a seamless album that blurred the differences. Taken as a whole, Mouth is the most straightforward of the first three HNIA releases but a closer listen evokes some dizzying tone shifts. In the middle of the record, one gets “Where Knock Is Open Wide” (a gentle, openhearted acoustic number), “Can’t Go Wrong Without You” (a slightly dark, slightly noisy number with an incredible hook), “Jack Rabbits” (a jaunty, twangy instrumental with spooky breakdowns), and “Sort Of” (a vocal-forward, ethereal piece that could have been on Home). While it may have been jarring for dreamy bedsit goths to have Defever indulging in shreddy guitar riffage on “Drink, Dress and Ink,” “The Torso,” and “Sick,” his love of rock pyrotechnics was never a secret (an early tape experiment was called “Whitesnake”). The unabashed directness and confidence of this material — and the surprising strength of the songwriting for a supposed “soundscaper” — marked a clear end of the first phase of HNIA and laid out the sort of unbound approach to styles and sounds that would ultimately guide Defever on all future releases. This expanded edition tacks on a nice clutch of demos, as well as “The Homesick Waltz,” which was a bonus track on the U.K. CD version of the album.
