His Name Is Alive

His Name Is Alive is the project of multi-instrumentalist Warren Defever, from the Detroit suburb of Livonia. After a brief apprenticeship in his brother�s band, Elvis Hitler, Defever gave free rein to his complex personality as an electro-acoustic composer, capable of bridging the vocal harmonies of opera with the instrumental scores of avant-garde music.

The compositions on Livonia (4AD, 1990) are arranged in a manner at once modest and evocative, with the vocals (Karin Oliver and Angie Carozzo) in the foreground indulging in classical registers, while electronics fill the background with unreal effects. Rhythm is often absent, leaving the vocals even more isolated. The sound shows vague affinities with Hugo Largo and Pale Saints. Perhaps it is precisely the �naked� compositions that reveal the suggestive power of His Name Is Alive�the more fairy-tale-like and disorienting pieces: As We Could Ever, with reverberated vocals and notes of the melody blending into one another; and E-Nicolle, built around soprano runs that spiral ever more baroquely around the singer�s clear and crystalline diction. Defever limits himself to discreetly scattering electronic noises, choosing harsh timbres reminiscent of �industrial� music�refined, but certainly not elegant.
Thanks to his work, there is at times the impression that the trio seeks to create a kind of medieval folk immersed in science-fiction landscapes: the vestal voices intone their classical elegies in settings disrupted by terrible sounds, nightmarishly radioactive in If July and almost infernal in Fossil; not to mention You And I Have Seizures, composed solely of wordless solfeggi in a sonic space packed with reverbs, tape loops, and samples; and the funereal psalm of How Ghosts Affect Relationships, the only track in which the vocals regain a humble, earthy, almost conversational tone, yet remain desperate.
Everything blurs into a dream of otherworldly realms beyond our comprehension, a game of projective identification within the afterlife, a chess match with the imagination of a psychiatrist, a hunt for the source of creative thought.

Home Is In Your Head (4AD, 1991) is an exercise that is almost too intellectual: twenty-three short pieces of minimal folk in the style of Half Japanese. Barely sketched choruses (Are You Coming Down This Weekend), nonsensical samples (Put Your Finger In Your Eye), surreal nursery rhymes (Her Eyes Were Huge Things), and so on. There's Something Between Us had been in their repertoire for years.

After the EP Dirt Eaters (4AD, 1992), credited to a lineup without Oliver and featuring singer Denise James, the album Mouth By Mouth (4AD, 1993) reaffirms the group�s ambitions with a slightly more aggressive sound. The guitars of the new trio (Defever on guitar and samples, Oliver on vocals and cello, Frey Many on drums, with occasional contributions from guitarist Melissa Elliott) are prominent, yet still retain that tentative Feelies-like step that unsettles without frightening (Baby Fish Mouth, an anthem of their languid surrealism; the instrumental Jack Rabbits by Elliott).
For the rest, the same simple magic prevails: Oliver�s gentle whisper, choruses that howl from infinite distances, the subtle bubbling of background noises; romantic vignettes like Lip (vocals nearly in a trance over a driving bluegrass rhythm) and �Alice in Wonderland�-like scenes such as Elliott�s In Every Ford (harmonies halfway between tender folk-rock and naive Buddy Holly).
It is therefore unsurprising that a faint resemblance to Laurie Anderson can be detected when the arrangements become a round for a chamber ensemble (cello and percussion in Ear) or when the harmonic foundation is minimalist (Lemon Ocean). But Oliver can go even further, immersing herself in almost funereal, Gregorian-mass-like atmospheres (Cornfield, accompanied only by a cello played like an accordion), or in quasi-mystical, Zen-prayer-like moods (Lord, Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace).
In the more experimental compositions (Drink, Dress And Ink, Can't Go Wrong Without You, especially Torso), which envelop the melody in bursts of electronics or distortion, a sort of �industrial folk� emerges for minds clouded by severe alienation trauma. Perhaps this is the correct lens through which to interpret even the seemingly most innocent songs.

The outtakes from those albums were released on King Of Sweet (Perdition Plastics, 1994).

Defever and Oliver channel their inclination toward this prudish troubadour style into an anti-rhetorical, somewhat idyllic art, stripped of erotic or macabre impulses, set in a lush �nowhere� from which the mind can never escape.

Warren Defever later joined Ian Masters of Spoonfed Hybrid to record the acoustic album credited to ESP-Summer (Time Stereo, 1994). There are also the projects ESP-Beetles (white noise) and ESP-Family (Time Stereo, 1994), surprisingly folk. Defever has also released tapes of cacophonous compositions under the pseudonym Princess Dragonmom, and an ambient music tape under the pseudonym Control Panel. Finally, Mystic Moog Orchestra (Tantalus, 1995) is an electronic music ensemble that improvises in an almost jazz-like manner.

Warren Defever continued his gradual conversion to pop music with the sophisticated Stars On E.S.P. (4AD, 1996), whose delicate ballads are entrusted to Karin Oliver�s faint whisper. Here, the eccentricity of their early work is used to construct highly surreal, almost ambient soundscapes over which angelic melodies float. In the past, this was their sound; now, these elements serve as the building blocks for a clever postmodern exercise in revisiting classic rock. The album is essentially a collection of disguised imitations in the most bizarre forms. Notably, the variations on the Beach Boys� Good Vibrations stand out: The Bees dismantles the structure (hammering organ in the background, light vocals); Universal Frequencies abstracts the parts (the rhythmic progression is slowed, the vocals become a Christmas-style choir, and the bells sound played by zombies).
The arrangements remain inventive, as in the mini-concert of percussive noises, folk fanfares, and spasmodic strumming of Wall, or in Dub Love Letter with reverberant organ drone, Indian flute melody, and dreamlike staccato guitar, or the fatal twang guitar � la Duane Eddy and brisk beat � la Associations in Static.
Defever even allows himself the luxury of playing three alternative versions of Home with intellectual nonchalance, itself a revision of an old traditional: the first (This World Is Not My Home) evokes a neurotic Neil Young; the second (I Can't Live In This World) is a gentle country ballad; the third (Last One) is a street gospel. This �anthem� opens, closes, and divides the album, thus serving to spiritually guide its flow. A small recurring theme of this stage in his life, it also symbolizes the ambiguity of all his music, which can assume different personalities depending on the arrangement.
Finally, Defever is the author of delicate, romantic lullabies like Across The Street and Summer Songs, expressing the humble and amazed feelings of his soul. The album also features Mark Kozelek (Red House Painters) and Ian Masters (Pale Saints), with whom Defever had created the impromptu E.S.P. Dolphins project the previous year. It is an exquisite album, whose only limitation is an obsession with Brian Wilson that risks turning His Name Is Alive into the American High Llamas.

Defever has a unique way, both erudite and tender, of being a postmodern auteur. Following the limited-edition EP Nice Day (4AD, 1997), Defever turned to deconstructing rhythm and blues for Fort Lake (4AD, 1998), aided by gospel singer Lovetta Pippin. Don't Glue The World, The Waitress, No Hiding Place, Everything Takes Forever, Wishing Ring, apply the same Defever formula to black music, depriving it of its vital fluid and disassembling its harmonic skeleton. Defever is a vampire who sucks life out of his victims. His music is a ghostly zombie that wakes up at night and sleepwalks through dark alleys in search of ever new victims.

Defever's solo album, I Want You To Live 100 Years (Lo, 1999), picks on a new victim: acoustic folk of the Depression era.

In the meantime, His Name Is Alive seems to have reached the terminal point with Someday My Blues Will Cover The Earth (4AD, 2001). Defever's career has always dealt with cliches in a subversive manner: his music succeeds when the stereotype is metabolized, he fails when the stereotype metabolizes him (in the form of a nostalgic playback of the genre's conventions). This album, a collaboration with vocalist Lovetta Pippen, aims at reconstructing the sound of swing-era big bands and of classic blues heroines like Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. In a different setting, Write My Name In The Groove and Karin's Blues would have been very attractive. As they are, all the songs here are just plainly tedious.

DeFever continued his foray into languid soul with Last Night (4AD, 2002). As a cheap imitation of Everything But The Girl, he (and his cohort Lovetta Pippen) is not terribly entertaining. I Can See Myself In Her and Last Night are third-rate even by the standards of trip-hop. To dispel the boredom, I Have Special Powers adds distorted, resonating guitar a` la Neil Young and Storm adds Hendrix-ian guitar acrobatics. The eleven-minute Someday My Prince Will Come offers loose jamming of a funk-jazz horn section over African percussion, spiced with some ethereal vocalizing. The seven-minute cover of Jimi Hendrix' Train becomes a slow-motion version of the Beatles' Yesterday performed by a tenor saxophone. Defever's talent is better served by the quasi-reggae hallucination of Crawlin' and by the surreal instrumental Idylls Of The King.

Heart And Hand (2000) and The Cloud Box (Time Stereo, 2005) are colossal collections of unreleased material.

The angelic Detrola (Silver Mountain, 2006), mostly sung by Lovetta Pippen, regained some of Defever's flair for the blend of fragile and baroque that made his music unique (You Need a Heart, After I Leave U, I Thought I Saw), while indulging in his skewed fusion experiments, whether funk-jazz-rock (Seven Minutes in Heaven) or mellow pop-soul ballad (Get Your Curse On).

Sweet Earth Flower (High Two, 2007) was a tribute to jazz saxophonist Marion Brown.

Xmmer (2007), with Lovetta Pippin replaced by a number of vocalists, indulged in the syrupy Young Blood and Go to Hell Mountain and the second-hand pop hook of How Dark Is Your Dark Side, while in theory incorporating elements of world-music.