Mouth by Mouth cover

Mouth by Mouth

Released

The first two His Name Is Alive albums, Livonia and Home Is In Your Head, were deeply hermetic things; isolated from the world, listening to them sounded like eavesdropping. Mouth By Mouth is just as intimate, but now HNIA’s Warren Defever has opened his music up – more vocalists, more instruments, more rhythm, more colour. Compared to what came before, it’s kaleidoscopic. The songs still hint at folk song and church music, in their reduced, repetitive structures, but now they’re vibrant with detail: “Lord, Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace” is cleaved in two by a sample of spiralling winds; the following “Drink, Dress & Ink” is song that’s fighting against its own boundaries, a tremolo’d rush of noise. The cover of Big Star’s “Blue Moon” stands out as Alex Chilton’s song is more traditionally formal, but HNIA fold even this into their imagined community of sound.

Jon Dale

Recommended by

Suggestions
MZUI cover

MZUI

Edvard Graham Lewis, Russell Mills, Bruce Gilbert
Onomatopoeia cover

Onomatopoeia

Butterfly Child
Lost Songs cover

Lost Songs

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
Parastrophics cover

Parastrophics

Mouse on Mars
Changez les Blockeurs cover

Changez les Blockeurs

Nurse with Wound, The New Blockaders
Peng! cover

Peng!

Stereolab
Gideon Gaye cover

Gideon Gaye

The High Llamas