Vinyl Box Set, Vinyl
Warren Defever has a strange superpower. He’s able to spelunk deep into the shadowy state of mind that lies halfway between waking and dreaming, capture what he finds there, and bring it back into the conscious world. Or at least that sure sounds like what he does with His Name Is Alive. Especially on How Ghosts Affect Relationships: 1990-1993, a big, bonus track-packed compendium of HNIA’s early years.
It wasn’t until the mid ‘90s—when groups like Long Fin Killie, Pram, and The Sea and Cake began populating record bins—that people started throwing around the “post-rock” tag, but artists like the Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil, Hugo Largo, and Shelleyann Orphan had been checking off “none of the above” on alt rock’s multiple-choice menu since the late ‘80s. In those days, 4AD Records was the first name in intoxicatingly moody un-rock—their roster included a lot of the aforementioned artists. His Name Is Alive was one of the few American acts on the roster, but their first three albums (Livonia, Home Is in Your Head, Mouth by Mouth) proved the mist-enshrouded Michiganders were as productive a dream factory as any of their UK peers.
How Ghosts Affect Relationships combines remastered versions of those albums with a bumper crop of extras, including demos, live cuts, and heretofore unheard compositions. Livonia (named for multi-instrumentalist Defever’s hometown) introduced His Name Is Alive to the world, with singer Karin Oliver’s one-woman ghost opera floating over Defever’s garage-sale jumble of organic and industrial tones. A string of additional tracks reimagines some of the tunes as bewitching chamber instrumentals for strings, bearing so little resemblance to the originals that they pretty much count as separate compositions.
Home Is in Your Head bounces harder between the extremes of Defever’s palette, swinging from ambient music to in-your-face experimentalism, fragile folkie balladry, and funhouse-mirror indie rock. At times it’s like GBV on LSD, with fragments flitting by in a minute or less. The addition of follow-up EP The Dirt Eaters ups the quotient of vocal-based song structures—including the wispiest cover you’ll ever encounter of a tune originally sung by Ronnie James Dio (Rainbow’s “Man on the Silver Mountain”). Contemporaneous live and rehearsal recordings might even convince you that this music was made by flesh-and-blood humans and not tuneful spirits from some phantom realm.
Mouth by Mouth was the closest HNIA had yet come to a conventional alt rock record, and it still lands a fair distance away. It’s also Oliver’s last blast, as she alternates vocal duties with three other singers. At times, it feels like a DIY cocktail of My Bloody Valentine’s dreamy noise and the wee-hours arthouse sigh of fellow 4AD’ers This Mortal Coil. A big batch of demos from these sessions leans closer to the MBV end of the spectrum, while offering both thumbnail sketches of album tracks and unrealized blueprints for songs that were destined to disappear into some darkened recess of Defever’s lair. Among the latter, “Roky” is an especially bright spot. Presumably named for 13th Floor Elevators leader Roky Erickson (whom HNIA would later cover), it generates a tremolo- and fuzz-laden frenzy underscoring Defever’s debt to ‘60s garage psych.
If you haven’t ventured into this territory before, there’s never been a better opportunity. If you have, you’ll still find little revelations peeking out from every corner as How Ghosts Affect Relationships blissfully reopens a door that seemed definitively closed for more than 30 years.
