Something About Hope: A Quick Review Of The New Compilation Of Early Recordings From His Name Is Alive
Looking back at it now, at my decades of obsession with the 4AD label, it seems odd to think that an American from the Detroit area did that whole sound better than any Brit. Warren Defever was His Name Is Alive and, despite whoever else was helping, he was the one who was chasing a muse. On his first few records under that name, the "band" captured something magical, taking the style created by This Mortal Coil and expanding it out into the void. Over time, Defever would add traces of gospel and American lo-fi to the His Name Is Alive sonic palette, with later albums a good deal different than the first records.
Still, those first handful of His Name Is Alive albums were magical, which makes All The Mirrors in The House (Home Recordings 1979 - 1986) such an important release from this act. Out on Friday via Disciples, this collection offers proof of Warren Defever's earliest experiments with -- for lack of a better term -- ambient music. The tracks here are enveloping, especially on headphones, and yet fully thought-out journeys though territory that sounds vast and unknown. "Rememory", for example, finds Defever using an Eno-like figure that sort of washes forward and backwards from a listener's point-of-view over the course of the track. The effect is remarkable, doubly so when you recall that it was a kid in Michigan making this spacious music. On "Guitar Rev", it's as if time's stopped, with only the crystalline shards of guitar-noise breaking through the silence. "Fine as Feathers", on the other hand, seems to owe equal debts to both Harold Budd and This Mortal Coil, specifically that group's cover of "Fond Affections" by Rema-Rema. The sheets of sound here pull a listener in, and the feeling is as if being carried by slowly-undulating waves. It is, like many of the tracks on All The Mirrors in The House (Home Recordings 1979 - 1986), amazingly warm music, even as it's music that defies simple categorization.
While Warren Defever was making these early recordings, terms like dream-pop and shoegaze didn't exist. If anything, this music would have been called New Age, but even that term would be a misnomer for what's here on All The Mirrors in The House (Home Recordings 1979 - 1986). No, this is simple, serious stuff, music that owes as much to Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, as it does to, say, Maurice Jarre and Ryuichi Sakamoto, composers whose film soundtracks favored synthesizers. Sequenced without any space between the tracks, this record presents these earliest Defever compositions as one progression of variations on a handful of shimmering sounds. There's little variety here in objective terms, and yet, there is so much here in the pieces that move forward, and in those that diminish as they progress, and in the very empty spaces in the middle of others. For tunes that were composed on keyboards, or samplers, or whatever, these cuts are all wonderfully organic. I mean, I don't want to get pretentious about it, because Defever certainly doesn't seem to be, but that's really what gives these pieces such an elemental power.
You can order All The Mirrors in The House (Home Recordings 1979 - 1986) here.
More details on His Names Is Alive via the official website, or via the official Facebook page.
[Photo: Matthew Jones]