His Name Is Alive

DETROLA | Silver Mountain
By MIKAEL WOOD  |  February 2, 2006
3.0 3.0 Stars

WIDE WORLD OF SOUND The only thing Warren Defever has kept constant in His Name Is Alive has been the name.About the only thing Michigan-based musician Warren Defever has kept constant in the decade and a half he’s been recording under the His Name Is Alive banner has been the name. (The name of the band, that is; Defever himself has gone by both Warren and Warn.) He established a brief 120 Minutes toehold back in the mid ’90s with an intricate brand of bedroom-bound dreampop. But subsequent HNIA discs have touched on everything from mechanized synth-rock to psychedelic Afrobeat to gooey Beach Boys fluff. So it goes on Detrola, the follow-up to 2002’s Last Night (HNIA’s final release for 4AD): though the album opens with a lush tapestry of strings and saxophone that suggests a trip back to Defever’s ambient shoegazer era, the chintzy post-Prince funk of “After I Leave U” (sung by Andrea FM) kicks in soon enough, as if to announce that Defever has no such journey in store. The album’s best cut is “I Thought I Saw,” a deliciously mellow soul-rock jam that imagines Todd Rundgren fronting Steely Dan. But that’s just one of Detrola’s varied charms; determining your own favorite requires a dip into Defever’s wide world of sound.

His Name Is Alive + Low | Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Square, Somerville | Feb 2 | 617.864.EAST

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