It’s been freezing, freezing cold here. And as I was walking home from work the other evening a song came on the old shuffle —a song so soufflé-light, with birds chirping and Spanish guitar and a voice as airy as early morning sunlight filtering through the trees— that I momentarily forgot about the ice cold, brutal wind whipping right through me and stinging my eyes.

Spring songs are different than summer songs. Summer songs are carnal, sun-drenched and earthy. They’re a little bit crude, certainly more anthemic. By contrast, spring songs are just waking up to sensuality. They’re quiet, yes, but also quietly celebratory. They, like the fog, come in stealthily, on little cat feet—taking you by surprise, just like the first tiny blossoms of a season that’s far too short to wear out its welcome (as summer often does). The world they paint is new and a little bit magical.

Dean and Britta’s “Knives from Bavaria” is like that. It's a very strange song. The lyrics are nonsensical, for the most part, but a bit obsessive in the middle there. (Thanks to the repeated refrain: “I love him, I love him, I love him I do.”) Here the production makes all the difference: when I listen to it on headphones it’s almost too rich, a crème brulée with a dollop of cassis at the centre. But I never tire of it —its lushness and heady quality are irresistible, whether it’s the first time I'm listening or the 1000th. Part of this is due to the lovely, sensuous interplay between the two voices (Luna's Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips —yes, the voice of Jem) —the emotional timbre they hit here is one of cautious ebullience. There’s this tinge of melancholy that inhibits the song from becoming a blithe summer tune. But it’s lightened by marimba (a jaunty, spring-like instrument if there ever was one) and the requisite yé yé “la la la”s. “Send me a rainbow, send me a word,” Britta sings, and I wonder if playing the song over and over will bring a winter thaw that much sooner.

Does such a song really exist, I wonder?

Hmm.

Guess I'll turn the heat up.

***
Britta Phillips & Dean Wareham, “Knives from Bavaria”

You can watch the video for “Knives” at Dean & Britta’s website. Their album, “L’Avventura” (named after the atmospheric Antonioni film) is available at Amazon and elsewhere; they’re recording a follow-up now. A tour will follow in the spring.

Posted by Andrea at 09:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I once compared Warn Defever to Max Ernst. This was way back, King of Sweet-era, even, and I thought of him as this mad genius who played with repetition and texture in the most fascinating ways,
creating a body of work that felt marvelously out of time. Even if it had discernable stylistic earmarks here and there, they were difficult to pinpoint amidst the dense sonic collages.

Fast-forward to 2006’s Detrola. We’re not in sepia-toned Ernst-land anymore, nor have we been for quite some time. But the fascination with repetition and texture is still there, even if, over time, the influences have become more obvious. Defever is working in a purely American idiom: writing deceptively throwaway pop songs with an unvarnished center of elegiac heartbreak. He gets purely bright, bubbly American voices to sing them. (Detrola features three singers: Erika Hoffmann, Lovetta Pippen, and newcomer Andy FM.) There are occasional echoes of the early His Name Is Alive sound—Detrola opens with the mournful, bleak “The Darkess Night,” which is anchored by cello, downbeat saxophone, drones and bells (an unexpected but lovely accent). From there, though, it’s anything goes as Defever casts his seemingly omnivorous range of influences far and wide across the album’s eleven tracks. The dominant strain of influence appears to be 70s MOR —think Carole King, the Carpenters, Memphis soul. It’s a tribute to Warn’s talent that the music never comes off as mere pastiche or as slavishly imitative —everything he touches he makes his own. And he does so in a quietly audacious, ego-free way.

HNIA albums sometimes remind me of that famous quote about the weather in San Francisco: “If you don’t like it, wait a second and it’ll change.” Detrola is no different, making stylistic leaps from song to song —from the unerringly Carpenterish “Get Your Curse On" to the soulful, funkified “I Thought I Saw” and closing with the mournful “Send My Face To Your Funeral.” But it’s Warn’s stylistic fearlessness and wry sense of humor that makes his albums such a consistent delight, even if you sometimes wish he were a bit more disciplined. But then, he wouldn’t be Warn and we’d miss his aesthetic omnivorousness. After all, who else is going to aim for sounding like “Dead Moon-meets-Pharaoh Sanders” (and succeed)?! I ask you.

Warn very kindly submitted to my line of questioning. Here’s what he had to say…

It seems as though with every HNIA album there's a new HNIA —not just in sound, but in personnel, instrumentation, aesthetic presentation, everything. This seems like one of the most full- bodied, well-integrated HNIAs we've seen in awhile. How did HNIA mach 2005/6 come together? How did you find (relatively) new singer Andrea? Or do people find you?

These are tough questions with days and days worth of answers, so I'll try to answer them in an abbreviated style: I spent the last couple years primarily recording other bands in the studio I opened in detroit, called BROWNRICE. One of the bands I recorded was Detroits' most super punk ass band called the Piranhas. The Piranhas are the kind of band where the singer takes off his pants and pees into a trombone and then plays the trombone and tries to shoot pee all over you (in the studio). Last year I had a party and they all came over my house and when all the alcohol was gone, we started drinking the brown smelly water at the bottom of the flower vases (we didn't die). Then Ian (the Piranhas’ guitar player) and his girlfriend (Andy FM) started singing me Elvis songs as a birthday present. It was great!!! I asked them if they wanted to record a tribute to Elvis and Andy said she hated Elvis. So I wrote some new songs just for her to record, next thing you know..... >>cont'd

Every HNIA album feels to some extent like a mix tape made for a (possibly errant, erratic, or otherwise elusive) lover. If Someday My Blues… was the breakup album, Detrola is the _______? And, if it's hard to simplify like that, what was your intent?

It's not really like a mix tape, it's like a mixed up tape.

Detrola seems like your take on the classic American MOR songbook (Carole King, the Carpenters, etc.). Was this a new challenge you set for yourself, or a natural evolution? Is there such a thing as a platonically perfect American musical vernacular? You seem to be so comfortable in all these different idioms, trying them on for size, subverting them, chopping them up Tzara-style into something that's got your particular stamp on it. It seems, in a way, like you've been making mash-ups from the very beginning of HNIA's existence. How would you characterize HNIA's evolution?

I guess I don't really think about it that much. In the past I think I tried really hard not to repeat myself. Like everything has to be constantly moving. For Detrola I tried to stick to what I already knew, like my comfort zone. Although I guess when I actually try to remember what was going on I think its really the same every time.

I start a new song and it’s like a totally blank piece of paper and I have no idea what I'm doing and that I have learned nothing over the years and I can't even remember what music is supposed to sound like.

How has Detroit shaped your sound? Can you imagine HNIA existing anywhere else? Speaking of Detroit influences, did you really record the Stooges recently, or is that a bit like how Simon LeBon "produced" Unrest's Perfect Teeth?

Question disqualified on grounds that it is really two or three questions in one.

Do you listen to your own music with a critical ear, or is it possible to lose yourself in it?

The time that I enjoy my own music the most is while I'm working on it, in the studio. I usually don't go back and listen to it, but if I do the worst part is always my own performance especially if I try to sing.

Have you ever surprised yourself with something you've written? Maybe you played it back later and thought, "I wrote that?!" Was it a happy accident you later tried to incorporate into your palette, or did it find its way into your working methods in some other way?

It’s usually the opposite, I hear something that someone else did and I think "I wrote that" but it always turns out to have been written or recorded ten to twenty years before I was even born, and then I try to figure out how George Gershwin was able to build a time machine go into the future and steal all my ideas and then go back to the 1920's and write "Rhapsody in Blue.” This happens a lot.

Pop-culture item(s) that mean(s) a lot to you (that's not music)? (book, poem, film, beautiful hand-painted sign, etc.) Do you first have the first beat-up cassette/45/8-track/stone carving you ever owned? What was it? (Mine was Nena, "99 Luftballons." C-30, C-60, C-90, go!)

ELO "Out of the Blue" was the first or second album I bought myself but I do have a hazy recollection of going in halfs with my older brother on a ZZ Top album too... I think it’s all pop culture: cell phones, elvis, internet, text messages, hotspace, eating, books, buddhism, cambodia, whatever. It’s how you take it in. If you’re all super-serious about something then it ceases to be pop culture —like all the critical analysis we're seeing lately about 80's hardcore scene. But since I take nothing seriously it’s all pop culture to me.

When you're young you (usually) digest music in a fairly non-discerning fashion (ie, passively). What song or band marked a turning point for you, when you realized there was a real power & expressiveness in music?

I started playing music at an early age with my family and the first real music I discovered on my own was Elvis and then rockabilly and surf music. I had grown up surrounded by music —country, western, polkas, waltzes, but that wasn't really my own thing. When I first heard Elvis I couldn't believe the energy and raw power. It’s hard to explain why I was in some sort of time warp or whatever…

The late Egg Magazine's music reviews consisted solely of the dollar amount they thought the album was worth. How would your most recent music purchases shake down for cash based on aesthetic & artistic, not retail worth? (Bonus: How'd you rate HNIA's oeuvre?)

I think it should be free if you're under thirty years old. If you’re older you should have to pay.

***

The Pine Cone II from the Cloud Box Sampler[right-click-save-as, s'il vous plaît]

Reincarnation (Early Music version)"

Get Your Curse (Summerbird version)

For His Name Is Alive news, tour dates, and free downloads, visit their official website. For more goodies take a look at Silver Mountain. Detrola is available at fine retailers everywhere.

Posted by Andrea at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

His Name Is Alive
Summerbird EP [2005]

There are many reasons to love His Name Is Alive’s eccentric mastermind Warren Defever. He named his band after an afternoon hallucination about Abraham Lincoln. He used to be in rockabilly hellraisers Elvis Hitler. And since 1986, he’s been happily and idiosyncratically mining his own seam of darkly humorous, poetic music, abetted by an ever-changing, fluid group of collaborators.

HNIA joined the roster of acclaimed cult label 4AD in 1990. With their first album for the label, Livonia (named after Warren’s hometown in Michigan), they brought a new, heretofore-unheard sound to the label. Superficially lumped-in with the ethereal sound the label was known for, Livonia quickly made it quite clear to 4AD obsessives that HNIA were hardly easy to pigeonhole. Their sound was purely American, rooted in rock and psych-folk. Less angular and rock-oriented than either the Muses or the Pixies, but too dissonant to fit in with 4AD’s more Goth-tinged releases, Livonia lulled listeners with aural wallpaper (“As We Could Ever”) only to jolt them out of their complacency with dark themes and jarring slashes of guitar (“Some and I”).

Despite the mournfulness of early HNIA releases, a certain wry, puckish sense of humor began to emerge fairly early, initially in song titles. (You get the feeling Warn loves titles, the more ridiculously monikered a song the better. Better yet, why not give it two titles? Or three?) Transitional HNIA releases like Mouth by Mouth and Stars on ESP bore out this push-me-pull-you battle between the contradictory impulses of profundity and absurdity. That smoothed out gradually over the years as the songs grew more polished and straightforward, but thankfully the tension is still present as an animating force.

Another is that of inspiration. As a composer, Warren’s always worn his myriad influences on his sleeve, making music that is heavily reminiscent —but never slavishly imitative— of his heroes (Chris Bell, Brian Wilson, and Theodore Roethke, to name but a few). He is by no means a hipster mining the past with his laser-sights and encyclopedic knowledge of music set permanently on “Ironic Detachment.” The music of HNIA is sincere and eminently hummable —and if that’s damning it with faint praise, well, I don’t mean it to be. Sincerity is in dreadfully short supply these days.

Warren’s musical plundering is never done in such a way that the music seems smug, or hermetically sealed, because he wields them so effortlessly, and in new, subversive ways. The entirety of 1996’s Stars on ESP plays like an early mash-up, veering from dub to pitch-perfect Beach Boys homage to full-on gospel by the end. There’s so much humor and pure cheekiness in the resulting song cycle that you can’t help but be won over.

For the most part, Warren works in a purely American idiom: writing deceptively throwaway pop songs with an unvarnished center of elegiac heartbreak. He gets purely bright, bubbly American voices to sing them. He’s a deeply idiosyncratic folklorist and preservationist who’s also a canny, witty producer. (For instance, it takes singular cojones to turn Rainbow’s “Man on the Silver Mountain” into a beatific lament.) Given this eclectic background, it shouldn’t surprise you to know that the group’s musical development post-Livonia hardly followed a predictable path. Each successive HNIA album has reinvented their sound whole cloth —from the haunting, obsessive song-poems of Home is in Your Head (1991) to the relative straightforwardness and ecstatic spirituality of Mouth by Mouth (1993) through to the bluesy, soulful laments of 2002’s 4AD swan song, Last Night.

Which brings us, neatly, to their new, self-released, internet-only EP, “Summerbird”, the first widely-available new HNIA release in a small forever.* (There have been a number of self-released items, some of which are still available through Time Stereo.) Its four songs take us from a bright, hazy midsummer day (opener “Summerbird,”) to the last, fading lights of Indian summer (the gorgeous closer “Get Your Curse”). “Hereforeveralways” sounds uncannily like it was made by Karen Carpenter and a beatbox that’d seen better days—but despite its rawness, it’s surprisingly lush and heartbreaking in the way the best Carpenters songs are. “Last Summer” is completely different again: a jaunty, hip-swaying tune that’s more Havana than Ypsilanti. “Get Your Curse” brings us back full-circle into happy/sad Beach Boys territory: it’s a deceptively bouncy little tune that grows more reflective as it wanes. An elegiac string section and slow, plangent piano see the song out. It’s a lovely effect, like a sunset painted in watercolor.

It’s good to see the group return to form after such a long silence. I’ve missed them. Now, if only they’d tour again.** If we’re lucky, they’ll even bring the whale next time.

***
* Except that I wrote this over the summer and their HNIA's LP, Detrola, has just been released!

**They are touring! SXSW and West Coast tour dates are now up at their official site.

Posted by Andrea at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember print zines? How charmingly quaint they seem, now...
Once upon a time my little zine came with a His Name Is Alive/Prolapse split flexi. By the time I got around to putting out a flexi —a craptacular-sounding but endearingly cute little flexible 7"— there was only one place to get them made, Evatone Soundsheets in Clearwater, FL. They made me sign an affadavit that the record I was pressing contained "no swear words." I crossed my fingers and signed "no," hoping they didn't listen too closely for content... (Doubly-irony? This was for the anti-censorship issue of the zine!)

"My Canada" is one of my favorite His Name Is Alive songs, and I'm not just saying that 'cause I released it. Warn's always been expert at slipping some charmingly perverse lyrics right past, couching them in gauzy or poptastic melodies, and this song is no exception. Maybe it's the banjo that lulls me into thinking this would be a perfect campfire singalong for one of those new-fangled hipster makeout parties...

What else have we got? Oh yes, "Library Girl" —ok, technically it's a New Grape song, but since it was released on a 4AD comp under the band name it can squeak in under HNIA. I think this samples some of the original NuGrape theme song (albeit in very very distorted form) but I don't know for sure. See the Valentine's Day post over at Said the Gramophone. ¶ "My Canada" and "Library Girl" are both available on the compilation Rare Tracks in the Snow. You can find 'em both at Time Stereo.

• His Name Is Alive, "My Canada"" [right-click-save-as, s'il vous plaît]

• His Name Is Alive with Dara, "Library Girl"

Posted by Andrea at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

His Name Is Alive has a new album out. It's called Detrola. We'll have more about that later. To start things off, we have an interview with His Name Is Alive's songwriter, Warren Defever, circa Mouth by Mouth, from the first ever issue of Warped Reality.

Delirium as a form of higher expression
Interview by Andrea Feldman & Jennifer Ferraro ¶ Warped Reality #1, Spring 1993

In the middle of my freshman year at Parsons School of Design, I decided to start a zine. I don’t know what possessed me —I was working towards a dual degree, it was my first time living in New York City, and I had zero free time. Maybe it was the lack of sleep clouding my judgment. Anyway, I was just starting to get seriously into 4AD and His Name Is Alive was my favorite band. But I also knew next to nothing about them. (Ah, those halcyon pre-internet days…) So I did what any extremely naïve 4AD geek would do under the circumstances: I called Ivo Watts-Russell in an attempt to get an interview with the band. (Obviously I didn’t know anything about proper press channels. Ah well, live, learn.)

Somehow, my unorthodox methods worked in my favor. Ivo actually called me back. We had a lovely chat and he informed me that not only were His Name Is Alive due to perform in a month as part of their first East Coast tour, but he would be there as well. So I got to interview Warren Defever and meet Ivo all on the same day.

Not bad for a complete 4AD neophyte.

I’m presenting the interview with Warren here in its entirety. As tempting as it was to rewrite the intro to this, I’m reprinting it as is. —Andrea

***
When I first heard His name Is Alive, I was simply amazed. I have no qualms about saying that the music by this Livonia, Michigan-based group is some of the more beautiful, original, inspiring, and often disturbing music I’ve ever heard.

I also knew absolutely nothing about them. So when they recently played a one-off show at the Pyramid Club in New York City, I leapt at the chance to interview this rather mysterious group.

I almost didn’t make it. The night of the show, the weather was so awful that I thought it was a sure sign of the apocalypse. There was hail, freezing winds, and icy, driving rain. To top it all off, Jen and I had to try and hail a cab in this hellish miasma —and there weren’t any to be found! (In New York, a second sign of the apocalypse!) Society dames with fur coats and small, shivering dogs had already snapped them all up. Finally, just as we were about to perish from exposure, we flagged one down. Crisis averted.

By the time we got to the club, there was no sign of the band! Sound-check hadn’t even started yet. Jen and I got a little worried. Finally, HNIA’s guitarist and leader Warren Defever showed up. We went across the street to a bar where we a (relatively) quiet spot to conduct this interview.

AF: How did you come up with the name of the band?

WD: [laughs] That’s just a great question to start with!

AF: You’re probably really sick of that question, but…

WD: No, no. In the past, I’ve always told people that, you know, it didn’t start off as a band that was going to be the big promotion —we had no plan of doing interviews. We were [just going to] put out records. There are a lot of personal things —things that meant something to me— that I never thought I’d have to explain. And that’s what I would tell people about the name and then they wouldn’t ask any more about it.

But the fact of the matter is —I was in high school and when I was in high school I had a little problem with sugar. Well, I would pass out a lot because I’d eat ice cream for breakfast and stuff. One of the things I wrote during one of these blackouts was the phrase “His name is alive.” It was a reference to Abraham Lincoln. There were other references that popped up that I thought were funny, but it doesn’t mean very much at all.

AF: When I first heard of the band, I thought [the name] His Name Is Alive had some kind of religious connotation. There seems to be an ecstatic feel to the band’s work…

WD: I think it fits. This new record [Mouth by Mouth] has more specific spiritual ideas, maybe moreso than the other two. Livonia [HNIA’s first album], the majority of it was written back when I was in high school, so I don’t really feel responsible. I was young, I was foolish …so I can’t say too much about that album. Home Is In Your Head [the second album] is a good album, and it says certain things about certain subjects and that’s interesting, but the new album is where we really put it together.

JF: Were you in any other bands, or was this your first project?

WD: There was a band that I played in for a long time called Elvis Hitler. I just played bass, I didn’t write any of the songs…

AF: Obviously!

WD: But it was a lot of fun. The best part about it was playing really lous and really fast. I got a lot of experience from it in dealing with the music industry and knowing what I wanted to do and didn’t want to do.

AF: What kind of music do you listen to?

WD: Oh, I don’t know...

JF: If you name one band, people think that sums up your—

AF: —you get pigeon-holed.

WD: What I think is important is that there are a lot of elements in His Name Is Alive —a lot of different, diverse parts, and that comes from listening to a wide range of things and stealing from them blatantly.

AF: Do you want to talk about the new album? [Mouth by Mouth] How come you re-made “The Dirt Eaters” [a song from Home Is In Your Head]?

WD: I’m in a band right now called the Dirt Eaters —with Melissa Elliott and Karen Neal, who sing some of the songs. Melissa wrote all your favorite songs on Home Is In Your Head, and she wrote the song “The Dirt Eaters.” And those songs are more full, less minimal, more drums, more bass. What we’ve done in the past is combine the two, but in the future they’ll be separate.

AF: There will be two releases?

WD:Right. But I don’t have as much to do with the Dirt Eaters, I’m just the lead guitar player. [laughs]

AF: You have your own studio, right?

WD: Technically, we have our own studio. It’s more like, just a bunch of equipment in a basement.

AF: Well, you can call it your own studio, c’mon!

WD:It is NOT a studio! I’ve seen studios, and this is not one!

AF: You create music there!

WD: Yeah, it’s cool. It’s really convenient. One of the reasons we’ve done it the way we have is that we have infinite studio time. There is no worry about anything. We just do what we feel like.

AF: That’s almost better sometimes. When you try too hard —when you just try to do something and it doesn’t come out, you just get blocked.

WD: Right, right. We’re at the point now where we’re ready to try a little bit. [laughs] Just to help us focus.

AF: I was surprised to hear that you were from America. I guess because, you know, 4AD’s British, but also because you don’t seem to have an American rock sensibility.

WD: Well, we’re trying now. We’re trying to incorporate that. The American influence is coming through more now in terms of older American music, like country music.

When I was a kid, my grandpa would teach us kids how to play. I’d play banjo and he’d play his guitar or fiddle. We’d play country music and waltzes and square dances. At the time, I thought I was rebelling by playing rockabilly! I thought, “You know, that stuff is for the old folks! This is what us kids really dig!”

I was clueless.

[The music] has always been there, but I never figured out how to incorporate it at all. But now I’m getting closer with that, and different American musical forms, like spirituals or hymns. It’s purely American.

Part of what we do is really repetitive, really organized. What we’ve done now is incorporate more freedom, more open space, and more physical improvising. Which we’ve never done before. There’s more ethnic parts on this new record, there’s more sampling, there’s actually more lyrics than on the other albums.

JF: How about videos? You’ve made two?

WD: We’ve done them with two animators from England called the Brothers Quay. They’re crazy, they’re absolutely crazy.

AF: How did you get hooked up with them?

WD: They get these tapes from bands every day. In England, they’re really famous. And over here, they make little spots for MTV and everybody goes, “Oh, those are so great, they should make a whole video.”

AF: They’ve done little movies too.

WD: Films. Long, major works of art that are great. They’d never done a full-length “rock n’ roll” video before. A long time ago they did a ten-second section of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” video.

Anyway, when Vaughan Oliver [head of v23, 4AD’s design firm] was in college, the Brothers Quay were teaching. He didn’t get to know them at all, but he loved their stuff, and he’d always wanted to set them up with a band. But there was never really a band that was appropriate for what they did. Then when The Dirt Eaters EP came out, Vaughan said, “Why don’t we contact them about making a video?” So we went over there, and they said, “We’ve never really done a video before. We don’t even like The idea of dong a video, but we’ll listen to it.” And they called us back and said, “This is really good. We’d like to do it.”

They’ve done a new one for us called, “Can’t Go Wrong Without You,” from the new album.

AF: For 120 Minutes airplay, huh? [laughs]

WD: Yeah!

AF: How did you guys get together?

WD: The band is just me and my friends. Just people I know. It’s pretty close-knit and tight.

AF: How did you all meet?

WD: Picture your friends. Now picture if they all played instruments. [laughs]

Different people play on different songs. Right now, I’m more interested in drummers and singers. On the new album, there are two drummers [Trey Many and Damian Lang], and four singers.

JF: You said you started this band in high school?

WD:Yes. The very first performance of His Name Is Alive was in 1986. It was at a try-out for Battle of the Bands. I sang and played guitar, and there was a string quartet. We didn’t make it.

AF: You self-released some cassettes before you hooked up with 4AD, right?

AF: Right. The first cassette was called [garbled]

AF: What was it called?

WD: Doesn’t matter. The second tape was called I Had Sex with God. That was the one Ivo [Watts-Russell, the head of 4AD Records] heard.

AF: Has any of this stuff appeared on albums? Have you compiled it, or is it gone forever, never to be heard again?

WD: Most of it ended up on Livonia. There are two songs on Home Is In Your Head that are older than ay of the songs on Livonia. But I’m not saying which ones!

JF: Do you always have stuff to write about? Do you ever get dry and can’t think of anything?

WD: I don’t write anything. The majority of the lyrics are jus quotes from people strung together randomly. No, that’s not true1 I don’t really think about what I’m writing, so I‘m not sure that it comes from experiences on a literal level. So, I don’t run out because I’m pulling stuff out that I didn’t know was there anyway. But there’s plenty of quotes!

There’s a song on the new album that has the phrase “Mouth to mouth” on it, right? We were thinking of that as the name of the album. But it just wasn’t satisfying enough. So then we came up with “Mouth by Mouthwest” which we thought was really funny, right, but kinda dumb. Then we came up with “North, East, Wes, and Mouth” which wasn’t even funny. It was just no good at all. Then we got it: “Earth to Mouth: Come In, Mouth.” Then we saw it on paper and the phrase “come in mouth” just did not look right. Scratch that. Eventually we ended up with “Mouth by Mouth” which looked good next to the other titles.

AF: Another question floated through my head, but—

WD: It’s gone!

AF: I think we’ve exhausted our questions, and possibly yourself!

His Name Is Alive’s third album, Mouth by Mouth, was released domestically by 4AD on April 13th. The band will launch its first national tour in support of the album in May and June.

Live, their sound is very stripped-down, consisting of Warren on guitar, Trey on drums, and Karin on vocals. But it is extremely powerful nonetheless. Plus, Warren will tell little stories about the cornfields back home in Livonia, Michigan.

POST_SCRIPT

There is some mystery regarding the His Name is Alive song “King of Sweet.” The title is listed (albeit upside-down) in the Mouth by Mouth CD booklet, and the March issue of Ray Gun featured a Vaughan Oliver/Colin Gray piece ostensibly illustrating the HNIA song, “King of Sweet.” Yet there’s no “King of Sweet” to be found anywhere.

Or is there?

In a recent phone conversation, Warren explained: “There’s this Japanese noise band who just released a box set called ‘King of Noise.’ And you know how Godzilla is the ‘King of Monsters’, right? Well, Vaughan (Oliver) suggested that we [HNIA] be ‘King of Sweet,’ and that I write a song around that idea. I didn’t come up with anything that was worthwhile, but we decided to use the name anyway.”

So it’s all a myth?

“Yeah. But there’s a limited edition CD of unreleased His Name Is Alive stuff coming out in June that will be called ‘King of Sweet.’”

Well, that’s one cryptic 4AD mystery solved. I forgot to ask Warren about the “Inner bag/Quality” seal featured prominently in both the Ray Gun artwork and that of the import vinyl of Mouth by Mouth.

In other HNIA news, the video for Can’t Go Wrong Without You, directed by the Brothers Quay, was finally (finally!) shown on 120 Minutes. Host Lewis Largent (who makes me pine for the days of Kevin Seal —and that’s saying something) called them “a wacky band from Michigan” and played the video dead last.

It’s sad (but predictable) that 120 Minutes plays two hours of benumbing grunge and “arty” videos only to relegate a work of art to the dead zone of 1:58 in the morning. Typical. I don’t suppose they’ll ever play it again.

His Name Is Alive has begun their first national tour, co-headlining with Swell. They’ll be playing TT the Bear’s in Cambridge MA on June 15th. You missed it.

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You can watch the video for "Can't Go Wrong Without You" thanks to the wonders of YouTube here. ¶ King Of Sweet, released in very limited quantities by Perdition Plastics, has been remastered and re-released. You can order it through the official His Name Is Alive site. Just click on "Sounds."

Here's a track off the import-only version of Mouth by Mouth (which includes samples left off the US version!):
His Name Is Alive, "The Homesick Waltz" [right-click-save-as, s'il vous plaît]

Posted by Andrea at 09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
— from “Not Waving But Drowning” by Stevie Smith

I first heard Vic Chesnutt in 1988, when my friends and I drove from Tallahassee, Florida, to north Georgia for the first Athens Music Festival. Celebrating a scene already past its prime, the event was held on a beautiful Fall day, in a farm-country pasture just outside of town. Modest in size and presentation, the festival air had a beguilingly provincial “Hey, kids, let’s build a stage, and put on a show” ambience. Arriving early, we spread our blankets on coarse, sunburned grass in a position close to the stage, dropped some acid, and awaited our entertainment.

There were hours to go before Michael Stipe would take the stage, performing as a trio with a local folk act who went by the name Indigo Girls. In between would be groups known and unknown—Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, Gravity Creeps, Kilkenny Kats, Dreams so Real, Love Tractor, Widespread Panic (not yet the jam-band phenomenon that has contaminated the world in the years since) and others—playing music that ranged from simple blues stomps to epic rock anthems. For me, one of the earliest acts would turn out to be the most memorable, for all the wrong reasons; an act that would change my life forever, for all the right ones.

Unknown and as yet unrecorded, Vic Chesnutt performed late in the morning, carried up the stage steps in his unwieldy chair by a pair of grunting stagehands, who wheeled him to the microphone and put his battered guitar in his stricken hands. What came next, with us now deep under the influence of LSD, we simply weren’t prepared for. He was crippled, and angry. His hands, incapable of caressing, clawed and scratched their way across the strings. His voice, harsh and raw, declared his defiance through lyrics childlike and strange. “I am not a victim. I am intelligent!” he wailed in “Speed Racer.” He threw his head back to whistle, and what came out was little more than air, pushed forward with desperate force.

In our impaired state, my friends and I found him ridiculous, and we laughed. We laughed. When he sang “Mr. Reilly,” with its lines “just a week ago she was beautiful, but now she’s rather vile” and “they found her in her skates, she was the coldest cadaver in the state,” we lost all control. Close to the stage, and thus in his line of sight, my friends turned their backs on him, lest he see their laughter. Unwilling to turn my back on someone performing for me, I struggled to keep my mirth under control, even as tears poured from my eyes. In the midst of my shaking, I was ashamed, but I could not stop.

Redemption, in the guise of revelation, came nearly a year later. Browsing the racks of my local record store, I happened across the latest release from the Texas Hotel label, by Vic Chesnutt. I had not forgotten Vic from that day in the pasture, that ridiculous little man with his ridiculous little songs. The album title seemed entirely appropriate: Little. I added it to my purchases, partly to see if the music was as silly as I remembered, and partly to play it for friends so they could hear for themselves the truth of the funny story I brought back from Georgia.

Arriving home, I placed the A-side on my turntable. A few plucked notes that bent upwards, a plaintive harmonica, and then the first line, “I dreamed I was dancing with Isadora Duncan.” I was smitten, and devastatingly so. Everything I had thought and felt before was wrong. This was far from ridiculous. This, this music, this little song, was simple, sad, and crushingly beautiful. “I whistled to her how I loved her the best, but she sang ‘I can’t believe you own this attitude.’” All I would come to love about Vic was right there, as he, bound to his chair for life by a car accident of his own creation, dreamt of an impossible dance with a dead dancer whose life had ended in a car accident of her own creation. “With some ballet moves I removed her shoes, and I painted my lips to hers, and still she sang, ‘I can’t believe you own this attitude.’”

To say I devoured the rest of the album would be an understatement. That weekend, I played it over and over and over; by Monday I would know every word by heart, feel every word in my heart. Michael Stipe, who produced the album, had the good sense to just turn on the mic and let Vic sing his little songs and play his guitar, without adornment. What came out was everything—anger and defiance, hope and dreaming, love and longing, melancholy and regret, passion, pain, sarcasm and humor—in lyrics that were strange, elliptical, and occasionally sweet, about characters made brittle from the difficulty of being.

In the years since, the songs on Little have been my constant companion. I have wooed a girl by playing her “Speed Racer,” and dealt with the bitterness of lost love by playing myself “Soft Picasso” and “Independence Day.” I have remembered the scarred loneliness of my childhood through “Rabbit Box.” I have found comfort in times of depression by listening to “Stevie Smith,” in which Vic sings the verses to the British poet’s famous poem “Not Waving But Drowning.” Seventeen years later, I still can’t listen to the album once without listening to it repeatedly, for days on end. I sing along, in my head and out loud.

Despite over a dozen brilliant albums to his credit (the first five of which I would place in the same pantheon as the Ramones’ first four records, or the Rolling Stones’ four-album streak that began with Beggar’s Banquet and ended with Exile on Main Street), Vic remains little more than a cult figure. His music is difficult to categorize, and, if you value slick and polish, difficult to listen to. His voice, brittle and nasal, serves lyrics that, at first hearing, can seem clumsy, even goofy. They plane in on their themes obliquely, arrive at a crucial point, and then dive-bomb to an emotionally devastating conclusion. His songs are bitter pills to swallow, but they reward with a gradual, diffuse warmth.

Since that first encounter at the Athens Music Festival, I have seen Vic perform several times over the years. At one show, I even had the audacity to shout out a request, something I had never done before (and haven’t since). The song was “See You Around” from Vic’s album About to Choke. Vic responded by saying, "Awww, I don't wanna sing that. That's an asshole song." He's right, of course. It's bitter and angry, in an "Idiot Wind" kind of way, only with a little sadness and regret thrown in. When he sings the lines "and hang out all night/in the familiar fluorescent light/of Dunkin Donuts" and "I’m sorry, but your routine/is coming off a bit ragged," his delivery is entirely reminiscent of Dylan's sneering, snarled performance of "Idiot Wind" on the live Hard Rain album, but his delivery of the refrain, "I will see you around," is drenched with melancholy.

Desperately seeking atonement for my cruelly dismissive first reaction to hearing him all those years ago, I have since been a one-man choir hell-bent on getting Vic his due, preaching his gospel to any who will listen. Few do. My brother-in-law called Vic’s lyrics “shallow,” and I never forgave him for it (it seemed an especially grievous transgression on his part, considering his love for the ethereal insipidness of the Cocteau Twins). In the past twenty years, I have had just one fight with my brother, after he made fun of Vic as we were driving to dinner with our girlfriends one night. The tension built to the point that I had to pull over, so we could both get out and talk our way through it in private.

Sound silly? You bet. But I can’t help it. I love Vic. And, for an album so little in its ambition and presentation, with its little songs of love and loneliness, Little still beats large within my heart.

***

Vic Chesnutt, "Mr. Reilly" [right-click-save-as, s'il vous plaît]

***
Giles Cassels lives and breathes in San Mateo, California. His favorite word is "Dolores." He can be reached at jakelives@excite.com.

Posted by Andrea at 07:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Once upon a time there was a lovely little band called th Faith Healers. (Don't ask about the 'e' —it went missing early on.) They were the first band on then-fledgling label too pure (now home to Electrelane, Laika, and Stereolab, among others), and they were cornerstones of the Camden "Lurch" scene. (Don't ask me to define Lurch. If you're lucky there's a Wikipedia entry by now.)

They kicked up a righteous racket —a furious, expressionistic squall. I don’t know that I could tell you what they were “about” any more than I could explain why their gleeful brand of organic motorik stomp—a style that melded a kind-of angular, oddly articulate grunge to the clean, crisp rhythmic mantras of Krautrock— remains so compelling, more than ten years after their untimely breakup. Part of it was due to the fact that the band never once took itself too seriously. Part of it was due to the manic, charismatic energy of singer Roxanne Stephen, whose vocals could switchback from sweet and delicate to full-on shriek and back again.

I think my eardrums have only just now recovered from seeing th Healers, Band of Susans, and God Is My Co-Pilot all in one night, way back when. Which could mean only one thing:

They're touring again.

That's right. To support the release of their Peel Sessions, they're doing a little reunion tour. So far, the schedule is looking something like this:

March 11th Berlin, Germany - West Germany
March 17th - Austin, TX SXSW Ba Da Bing!/Leaf Showcase at Blender Balcony At The Ritz (w/ volcano!, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Colossal Yes and Beirut)
March 22nd Boston, MA - Pa's Lounge (w/Bright)
March 27th Brooklyn, NY - Northsix
March 29th New York, NY - Mercury Lounge
March 30th Philadelphia, PA - The Khyber (w/The Nethers, The War On Drugs)

I'll be at the Boston show. And I sure as hell won't forget my earplugs this time.

I'm posting one of my favorite tracks of theirs, a marvelous dub edit of the 25-minute long monster "Everything, All at Once, Forever" that closed out their album Imaginary Friend. This track is pretty much unavailable (as far as I know). Enjoy!

th' Faith Healers Peel Sessions is out now on BaDaBing! The tour starts in March.

***

th Faith Healers, "Everything, All at Once, Forever (Dub Edit)" [right-click-save-as, s'il vous plaît]

Posted by Andrea at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When I’m having a good day, I often find myself humming this song.

I guess I had a good day today.

Minxus were an odd lot. They never quite gelled as a band —their lone album, Pabulum [Too Pure], had a couple of marvelous songs on it but seemed on the whole a bit thin. But then, live performance was more their arena. Given that the band was led by the impossibly monikered Mod goddess She Rocola (who looked as though she’d just stepped out of Faster Pussycat Kill Kill), you’d hardly expect some sepia-toned aural wallpaper. No, the music of Minxus had the superb whiff of grindhouse sleaze, with Rocola’s brassy vocals riding the mondo trasho tide of squalling guitars and a smoking rhythm section provided by Miss Rocola and Flaming Star Joe Whitney.

Also, I love bands with theme songs. Every band should have one!

***

I’m off to Boston to see His Name Is Alive and Low. I’ll be back next week with some surprises. Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

***
Minxus, "Minxus" [right-click-save-as, s'il vous plaît]

More info on She Rocola's whereabouts here: The She Rocola Revue

Posted by Andrea at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)