HNIA: By George, I think I've got it
A lot of those bands who are critics' darlings, I just don't "get." That's odd, considering that such bands are usually the brainchild of an obsessive music geek, and as an obsessive music geek myself, shouldn't all of music geekdom appeal to me? It doesn't, though; all too often I just can't find anything in the music that I can hold onto, or remember, or get excited about. Sometimes I just need a key, whether it is a single work that then unlocks my understanding of the whole oeuvre, or someone else's keen observation. (Somewhere in there is a private key/public key encryption metaphor, but I can't quite work out the translation.) I gleefully ridiculed Jackson Pollock until my art history professor mentioned the "rhythm" in Pollock's paintings, and then I saw it, and that's all I needed to appreciate Pollock. (I've seen Lavender Mist countless times in the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art; I prefer to call it Purple Haze.) So it is with His Name is Alive, the Michigan-based project of music geek Warren DeFever, who keeps shortening his name so that on this year's Xmmer album he is credited as simply "War." Unlike his previous albums, Xmmer connected with me, to the extent that "How Dark Is Your Dark Side" is one of the two songs stuck in my head this week:
Maybe it's that War's work with Michigan Afrobeat band Nomo, of whom I'm a big fan, has bled into this album and given it a vibe I can handle. (Nomo bandleader Elliot Bergman plays a little on it, and War has taken up the mbira, a staple of Nomo's sound.) And I can never resist a fat synth riff like the one on "Dark." Whatever the reason, I really like this album, and now I look forward to listening to the back catalog with new ears.
