Livonia

The first album proper by His Name Is Alive, after a number of self-released cassettes, Livonia reads a little like a negotiation between the vision of HNIA’s Warren Defever – the sole constant in the group – and Ivo Watts-Russell and John Fryer of the 4AD label, who mixed and assembled the material here. But the ghostly sheen they apply works well: these simple songs, often see-sawing on two simple guitar phrases, and scaled by Karin Oliver’s clear, unaffected voice, are best when pared back to their skeletons. The suburban, surrealist folksiness of Defever’s writing has these twelve songs sounding like reconstructions, from fragments, of the folk songs of a lost religious sect.