Music Arcades: His Name is Alive: Someday My Blues will Cover the Earth

Neil Young once said, probably with tongue in cheek but you never know, that he tried (in the '80s) to systematically destroy his audience. As a new devotee of his at the time, I took a hair-shirt masochistic pleasure in remaining loyal through the days of Everybody's Rockin' and beyond. I'm toughing it out, Neil, you can't shake me off.

But His Name is Alive are not Neil Young. As its Wikipedia entry begins, "Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth marked a huge change in the sound of His Name Is Alive, and is a controversial record among some of the band's fans." Having got this just after its 2001 release on the strength of previous albums, I never bought another one of theirs, and more or less stopped listening to the ones I'd previously liked. I thought they'd gone all Zero 7 on me.

The knee-jerk assumption when an artist seems to abandon experimental music for something more commercial and radio-friendly is that they've got some bills they want to pay off. Which, if true, is nothing to complain about: I make compromises to pay bills all the time. But maybe, just maybe, the assumption was all wrong, and the new direction was in fact a clever postmodern pastiche, and thus a more radical form of experimentation. I don't know. But I noticed on Last.fm that one of HNIA's more recent albums is a tribute to Marion Brown featuring a cover of an old Harold Budd track — now that's not the tactic of someone chasing a quick buck.