His Name is Alive Home Is In Your Head. I can't remember, it has been many long years in the wilderness, if I have already written about this album. It was the second best album of the 1990s. Were you aware of this? Long before there was a Pas/Cal, although not that long before there was an Asha Vida, there was a His Name is Alive and an Elvis Hitler too. Much of it is crafted as a larger suite or so my perceptions have adapted it. Sounds familiar. The suite of songs on I Was Disillusioned by Matthew, Mark, Luke and Casimer sounds half-completed, like it was tacked on at a whim at the last moment in an act of desperation. But those are my hurtful ears talking. A short introduction then a beautiful bit of pencil guitar, echoes abound, wordless vocals back from the golden age when there were 6 or 7 singers on every His Name is Alive album. We are still longing for His Name is Arrive, even if it might be racist. Third song already, gone from the gypsy caravan and into a snake charmer cum doomsday scenario with some eastern sounding vocals. Can't understand a word because it's effect more than message here. This is before Warren Defever knew his guitar intimately. It's probably common knowledge, the story of how they, His Name is Alive, were signed. He sent Ivo demos, and mr. Ivo at 4AD was not impressed. Warren persisted, he was young and idealistic, naive. Ivo eventually rejiggered the demos and made Livonia. It's a classic as well but we are not concerned with those facts here. Livonia, the city, needs an entry of its own one day. Or I could just link to its entry on Wikipedia. All of the ash trees in Livonia have been euthanized. Next song, charming clanging of pipes, the romance of industrial might, I could see the young Warren being a fan of the Einsturzende Neubaten and KMFDM and Sisters of Mercy. Yes. Elvis Hitler were more hardcore than industrial, it was his older brother that was either Elvis or Hitler. Moody melancholic momentum now, industrialism tuns to jarring technology to gentle glacial retreat. Now two singers. A chant, almost a capella, clockworks and sounds of urban paradise in the background. I went to work again this weekend. It has been a few weeks since I have had a day off, I haven't anything else to do. Even when I went out of town I was working all through the weekend. Well. This is when His Name is Alive were pious and devout or convincing enough while feigning it, their habits decollate, not their heads, hark. There were loads of biblical references, my friend Andrew would excitedly reel them towards me "Knock is open wide" is directly from the Bible! He would cry out in glee. And then I would explain all of the biblical references in the Stone Roses to my cousin Jeremy later in the summer. It was a lazy existence. We are on song number six, The Well, stunning, so so stunning. Guitar, ambience and a gorgeous vocal. I am assuming this is Karin Oliver. All of the beautiful things belong to Karin Oliver. Her voice is on level with Liz Fraser and Lisa Gerrard when comparing all time 4AD greats with formulas and hidden variables and simple groups on an excel spreadsheet, easily. Ivo was going to drop His Name is Alive after Livonia because foolish cretins cared little for Livonia but then he heard the demos for this record and changed his mind. You could, once upon a time, order the original demos, assembled before Ivo etherealized them. They are not anything to be treasured. Later came that box of balsa wood with the scraps Ivo discarded. I wonder what the demos to the Pas/Cal album sound like. Do they demo? Are there songs on the demos? They became the disappeared on their journey to the album. Next song, gothic, ethereal, brutal seeming, echoing guitar, gauzy production, nostalgia, humidity, the I-75 corridor, Arthur P, feral dogs in packs chasing civilization down the center of 8 mile, devil's night records surrendered to Newark. Beautiful. It was always a puzzle that something this gorgeous could emanate from Detroit. They were completely unknown in Detroit for the first five years of their existence. They did play live, as a three piece normally, sometimes they would assemble larger groups in their mystic moog orchestras but until the era of the whale and the electric giraffe they were unappreciated. It was criminal. This album was not originally issued in the USA, later Rykodisc released it in a reconfiguration because the original incarnation was beyond the grasp of the average American. I may have that reconfigured version in my ears now. Who can be sure. Much of the original intent was waylaid by the stench of corporate bunglers. Is Ryko really corporate? Unlikely. Melissa Eliot was in the band at this time. Oh how I swooned over Melissa Eliot. I would drive to Car City Records, mainly to stare at their wall of vinyl and search its contents for treasures like the Moles and Smiths' 10 Inch records but also to stare at their resident Dirt Eater. She had a beautiful guitar, I noticed, in between winks, in between deep draughts. it was a miserable existence. It is always a miserable existence. There are new records to be listened to. I found It's A Musical. It includes Bobby Baby, everyone loves here, perplexing really, It's a bit dull but then it is on Morr. Her story seems as if it should be brilliant as she's Norwegian or Swedish or Finnish and she now lives in Berlin and she has been writing songs since she was a young tyke and well she is not as sophisticated as she should be. It starts off great, but then I'll get to that some other time. It's better than Pas/Cal, most things are, little consolation. There's Something Between Us And He's Changing My Words. The ambience that surrounds the guitar strums is heartwarming, the lyrics bitterly morose, it's absolutely perfect. Now into the fog of romantic disentanglement, coming up Woodward leaving Ferndale discovering Birmingham, moving into the bosom of West Bloomfield. Look Matthew Jacobsen. Look, my High School. look, the school that I was kicked out of for exhibiting criminal shyness. Honest. I am not shy now. It's more the insecurity that smothers my well being. Are We Still Married? shows up on The Dirt Eaters EP. That was meant to b a Dirt Eaters album, I believe, there never was a Dirt Eaters album, ti rests with His Name is Arrive. When you can't play the guitar properly it seems you are forced to turn clever instead, all sorts of marvelous layerings of effects and moods happening here behind the semi-monotone(for effect) vocals. Perfect interlude of surreal childishness that blends into a dark atmospheric pice of low tones and ominous portents. It's a bit like a Conrad novel. A novel come to life, as a short instrumental, before a turn into the light, it is the HEart of Darkness, it is yellow Fever, it is youthful uprisings among the natives, all before the dawn. Much of this feels as a Palimpsest, you can sense the erasings around the edges of the songs, the careful sketching in of tender accompaniments and desire. Now the first rays arrive, a wheezing string section, possibly the soundtrack from an abattoir or drivers training video. Dissonance into a stunning violin played ever so carelessly, finger plucks and madness and the piles of hair in the bath tub drain. It's all made beautiful in Why People Disappear. Dramatic strums, then moe guitars, three or four, Karin Oliver comes in, husky, deathly, elegant, romantic, charming, exquisite. Everything that we wish we were but it is only pop song heroines that can possess such perfection. The end, the quickening, the last line, "so we're complicated, so what"-perfect-flute. Was this an open shop record? More samples. More random effluvia. It feels entirely undiscrete, amorphous, all of the songs could play at once and disorientation itself would align your senses into some unified impulse where all of the forces had returned to their primeval state. Chances Are We Are Mad, this is the obvious mix tape song. The semi-extreme guitar opening and then the fall into a gossamer ballad that weighs heavily still, a fiery momentum towards a substantiation, then the end, sharp pangs of electricity and nothing, it dissolves into the fabric of the whole. Just absolutely wonderful, this. Which is the best album of the 90s? Moonshake Eva Luna, no contest. I wrote about that one long ago. That entry is gone. It's brutal and extreme. This is delicate and preposterously beautiful. More random samples of industrial life. There is a steadiness to the playing but all about is a softening focus, the blood that seeps from the soil of the ones who came before. There seems to be a struggle inherent to the identity of Detroit. Contentedness always seems a mirage. It's a vanishing identity these days, everyone is abandoning hope, transplanting their dreams to a new epicenter. This music is nostalgic for a city that never existed, anglophilic and xenophobic all the same. I wonder if they desired adulation from those closest to them, perhaps they made these tender pleas to the angels. A drone now, baisc, it is turning me inside out though with its wavering crescendo, the undulating diminishment and the trailing edge. Into Very Bad A Bitter Hand. True heartbreak is difficult to outline. It's repeating riffs on an acoustic guitar, it's a sublime vocal, it's double tracked melancholy. The lyrics are artful and simple, in a grand sense of youthful idealization. The pretense of the title works splendidly, it's a goth student's dream made real, many a pained portrait of grievous emotional dictators were compiled with this as impetus. it's magical. When I left Detroit His Name Is Alive decided they were an R'n'B band. I couldn't make that journey with them. Where was the antiquing that made this record so compelling, the old soul nature or wordlessness that conveys more desire and loss than any romantic poem composed in any British summertime. A random strum here, it's ecological, there are paeans to the earth, to goddess' hidden in depths and blood nourishment for tribute. There are fairy rings and gorilla suits frozen in ice. Karin Oliver's "cousin" is now His Name is Alive singer, she sounds remarkably similar. The biblical nature of the proceedings adds gravitas where cynicism might subtract points for earnestness. Religious devotion could be a conduit to express love that you are too terrified to express to human companions. I've never expressed any deep emotions to anyone, I've never felt that I have unloaded any deeper passions, I feel them bundles in quantas in my fingertips and at the ends of my hair but I can't ever release them to the ether searching for a target to embrace. I am unembraceable myself. Outstretched. A silly martyr complex. I am not sleeping because I am condemned to a dream life of regret. There is still time, the clock is ticking "literally". The wash of guitar here is magnificent, first mirroring the ticking of a clock, my metaphor extended into the night, another guitar joins, another, mild dissonance composed into a radiant symphony. And brevity, always the tact o make your point and escape. Pas/Cal songs are all too long. Exhaustion comes only just before the sunrise. Love's A Fish Eye, this could be mix tape material, but it could only finish a side and it must be accompanied by Dreams Are of the Body. I would have daydreams of His Name is Alive performing this at an awards show somewhere somehow and the crowd awash in tears of joy over it's graceful beauty. Guitar scrapes, soaring vocals, stop, climactic finish with the ecstatic rush of guitar dissonance sculpted perfectly into a gentle farewell that segues into a moment of reflection to carry through.