His Name Is Alive - Mouth By Mouth download mp3 flac

Wow, I hated this album. The first time I heard it. I thought it was a cluttered, pretentious mess, and that the parts that do work are dragged down by the tedium of the rest – most – of it. The vocal delivery aloof and uninterested, the lyrics moronic, the style indecisive and the attempts at grandeur over-calculated.

Proving that this is not the album to listen to when you’re tired, hungry (I get easily irritated then) and looking for some easy, accessible background noise to pass some time while playing ‘Bubbles Deluxe’. This is music to decipher and study. This is audio art.

Which I got on the second and third listens, that I felt I had to give this thing in the first place because despite my initial irritation, I did find the album haunting me afterwards; the echoes indicated that it wasn’t put together by someone who didn’t know what they were doing, and maybe – just maybe – it’s would be a worthwhile thing to get back to once I’ve slept, eaten, and was cerebrally available enough to give it the mind-set it demanded.

And those demands are more than you can say about much, much music, which is more preoccupied with selling you on the short-term than even attempting a challenge to your delicate predispositions. So while yes, this is experimental music and almost by definition not all of the experiments contained herein work; and yes, like anything with artistic aspirations it truly depends on how much the viewer or listener is open to the end product and the ideas behind it, on either an emotional or intellectual level; and oh yes, like too much contemporary art there is a better chance to enjoy or understand this work the more informed you are about the background matter; while this is all true, if not always successful on its own terms, this is a pretty damn good and definitely interesting album.

In the strongest moments, you get a kaleidoscope of styles and influences filtered, skewed, and molded into surprisingly coherent dreamy alternative rock; there are flavors of Japanese music, Psychedelia, guitar monster-mash, dream-pop, 60’s pop, Goth, Folk – you name it, it’s there somewhere. At times this multitude of genres seems more shoehorned than organic (Sick), as if the main imperative was to avoid being ‘traditional’ at all costs; the attempts at atonal noise end up more irritating than stimulating (Drink, Dress, And Ink; Can't Go Wrong Without You); and on the other hand, when they go for a more traditional approach the results can be slightly, well, traditional (Blue Moon); the lyrics veer from overly obtuse (Ear) to utterly poetic (the exceedingly beautiful Lemon Ocean), but for the most part stay somewhere in between, peeking out at you from behind an intentionally simplistic veil; the vocals, for the most part, are a less angelic Julee Cruise – make of it what you will, but I’d call it 4AD house-style.

When it does work, it produces strong and fascinating music well worth returning to; The Dirt Eaters provide well-received, material-elevating guitars on multiple tracks – shining examples are the opening Alt-romp (Baby Fish Mouth); the semi-closer (The Torso) in which the guitars evoke images of a Scottish army bagpipe division on the march; and the well-deservedly titled final track (The Dirt Eaters), a dreamy slice of rock which erupts into a symphonic psychedelic wail.

So on the whole, despite not always living up to its own expectations, at least the album really does place expectations – and high ones, at that – on itself; and while I still prefer the less deliberate, more deep-rooted lunacy of, say, The Residents (or the stylistically-kaleidoscopic emotional dementia of later 80’s Foetus), I ended up really liking this album despite its shortcomings. Give it a go.

In a sentence: More intellectual than emotional, with substantial artistic merit, and considerable integrity.