Firefly Dragonfly

Sweet Earth Flower: A Tribute to Marion Brown "Just the fact that one of our favorite bands dedicated a show to honoring the music of one of the greatest and most overlooked free jazz saxophonists and innovators of New Music that we know of was enough to make our list." -- Salon.com "HNIA, whose trademark has been mixing pa...	Xmmer His Name is Alive is well known for their ethereal, last night meditations but on this new amazing album the band picks straight up where last years Detrola left off. Pitch fork media gave Detrola an 8.5 and described it as "someone singing softly right in your ear".	Home Is in Your Head	Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth The change in direction which Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth embodies may have been a gradual one for His Name Is Alive, but it may still come as a shock (although hopefully a pleasant one) for fans of the one-time Cocteau Twins-influenced art rockers. This beautifully...	Mountain Battles Breeders fans waited six years for Mountain Battles, a recording that nonetheless offers instant satisfaction, cherry-picking many of the lasting and likeable elements from the band's three previous albums that were released across nearly two decades. Twins sisters Kim and Kelley...
Before The Day Breaks It's been more than 20 years since pianist Harold Budd's first full collaboration with guitarist Robin Guthrie's former group, the Cocteau Twins, on The Moon and the Melodies. Primed by their atmospheric collaboration on the score to Mysterious Skin, they pick up where they left...	After The Night Falls It's been more than 20 years since pianist Harold Budd's first full collaboration with guitarist Robin Guthrie's former group, the Cocteau Twins, on The Moon and the Melodies. Primed by their atmospheric collaboration on the score to Mysterious Skin, they pick up where they left...	Detrola With Detrola, His Name Is Alive brainchild Warren Defever finally combines all his musical interests on one album! Whether it's soulful heavy soul, gurgling electro-pop, smooth confessional indie-folk, or strange bedroom croon tunes--they're all here. It's not exactly "cohesive."...	Third Portishead's Third has been a long time coming, the result of a lengthy creative torpor following 1997's dark, distinctly underrated album Portishead. Importantly, though, they've shaken it. While the core trio of Beth Gibbons, Geoff Barrow, and Adrian Utley remains, this is quit...	Chemical Chords Being released by the iconic legendary label 4AD, Chemical Chords is a collection of purposefully short, dense, fast pop songs, according to Gane, brimming with Motown-like drums, O'Hagan's finest baroque-pop brass and string arrangements and etched with some of Sadier's most elo...

eternal reinvention
His Name Is Alive is in a perpetual state of re-envisioning their material, and on the "Firefly Dragonfly" EP, they bring us not only a stripped down "Come Out The Wilderness" (an alternate version from their latest full-lenth "Xmmer,") but also a languid update of "There's Something Between Us And He's Changing My Words" that dissolves into the bells, cello drone, and seemingly random sprinkled piano and guitar notes of "Send Me A Dragonfly," a fourteen minute offering that recalls Warn Defever's more abstract recorded output of the past (like the "Cloud Box.") That and a Sufjan Stevens cover. This is definitely not the first time HNIA has covered their own songs -- projects like the "Raindrops Rainbow" digital EP or "Livonia Strings" demonstrate their restless re-imagining of their own canon, not to mention numerous alternate versions of "The Dirt Eaters." It's as if they keep the songs alive by occasionally resuscitating them -- ensuring there is no such thing as a "definitive" recording, no arteries hardening or muscle-memory atrophy. This is a great addition to "Detrola" and "Xmmer" for fans, though probably not the right place for the casually curious to dip their toe into HNIA. I suspect that was the band's thought when they decided to package these songs separately from the "main" albums, on their own E.P., released by a Spanish label.