His Name Is Alive: Underground River Of Black Electricity 7″ EP (self-released, 2024)
October 8, 2024 at 9:14 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
His Name Is Alive: Underground River Of Black Electricity 7″ EP
His Name Is Alive rarely play live these days, as Warren Defever is busy working as a mastering engineer at Third Man Records in Detroit, and he’s also been playing as part of the group Infinite River, making new age and meditative music, and making art. But 4AD released a tremendous box set of the first 3 HNIA albums with bonus material, so the band played some live gigs. I caught the Detroit show at El Club, and it was mindblowing to see the current version of the band play early songs like “How Ghosts Affect Relationships” and “There’s Something Between Us And He’s Changing My Words”. And then they played songs from the more recent albums (the ones the current band members played on) and of course ended with “This World Is Not My Home”, into “Can’t Go Wrong Without You” and then back into a for-real singalong of “This World Is Not My Home”. This record was for sale at the merch table, along with Cloud Clocks, which were basically repurposed clocks bought at Target which they painted, signed, and charged $100 for. But this record is a mix of Warren’s new age stuff, thanks to the harmonium and tanpura droning, as well as some of HNIA’s newer psych stuff, with the Mellotron, though it’s not proggy or heavy. There’s gentle guitar waves and a current of dreaminess. The second side has drumming by Steve Nistor, who regularly plays with Infinite River, and it’s closer to the more drifting side of Krautrock, eventually gaining some percolating synths and a choppier, increasingly more complex rhythm. Not quite Warren solo, not quite Infinite River, not any previous version of HNIA, but it’s still HNIA all the same, and like any HNIA record, it takes me somewhere I can’t identify and never expected to go.
The Answer Is In The Beat 
Leave a comment