His Name Is Alive
How Ghosts Affect Relationships: 1990-1993
4AD
His Name Is Alive’s Warren Defever has always been more of a centerpiece than a frontman—the restless eye of an insistently stirring hurricane, always with the capability to craft meditative melancholy from the most minimal of melodies with the skill and spirit of a painter wilding out with a fresh set of oils. If you could tie the gossamer-winged woe of This Mortal Coil to the goth-not-goth guile of Black Tape for a Blue Girl and the electronic whirr of Broadcast, and add a dash of Pixies-ish edge, you’d find His Name Is Alive and the very soul of the 4AD label’s early-’90s sound. And while the 21st century has found the Michigan-based producer and instrumentalist winding his way through prog-metal and drone soundscapes, it’s His Name Is Alive’s earliest triumphs that are the focus of this six-LP How Ghosts Affect Relationships collection.
Vocalist Karin Oliver offers a full-bodied tone throughout these recordings spanning 1990 to 1993, a dense connective tissue that courses emotionally among Ghosts’s three principal albums with “Are We Still Married?” from 1991’s Home Is in Your Head being one of the collection’s most particularly prickly tracks. For all of Oliver’s dramatic sensibilities (and there are many), it’s the layer-after-layer of varied atmospheres, mood swaths, and muscular (and, of course, supple) instrumental elements that prove to be the real highlight of what His Name Is Alive was responsible for during this four-year period, additionally including the ethereal experimentalism of 1990’s Livonia, 1993’s Mouth by Mouth, and the test-pattern sound-alike rarities recorded in between.
These rarities present instrumental string versions of Lavonia with the same sorrowful moan as the original recording, but with a greater sense of yearning soul-searching in each saw and stroke. I don’t know what the fuck a thick cover of Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow’s “Man on the Silver Mountain” is doing here as part of the art-rock-roar of Home Is in Your Head, but enjoy. And for each never-before-heard experiment, the thrill of this first-era His Name Is Alive box is hearing how Defever refreshed the overall sound of his 1990-1993 output (which already came across with the detailed production of a boat model being built inside a boat model)—not to mention the joy of guessing what the producer-composer might do with everything coming after this time period.
