Music Arcades: His Name is Alive: Livonia

Having begun with their second album, My His Name is Alive collection moved on to their fourth before circling back to this, their first, and ultimately their sixth. Not that I knew the chronological order at the time — comprehensive online listings were rare and hard to find — I just put "His Name is Alive" into the search field on the now-defunct Cheap-or-What site and, if a title came up in the results that I hadn't heard before, I bought it.

Wikipedia gives a tortuous and unusual history of how this album came to be, with the heavy involvement of the 4AD/This Mortal Coil producers at the mixing stage. It does sound like it's following in the wake of the Cocteau Twins. A lot of the time, you can barely hear the music for the production. So much playing with the reverb on the vocal, plus many other effects on the (sparse) instrumentation — even some flanging and panning. Not that that is a reason to dismiss it. I'm not one of those bores that says "a good song will always sound good when sung at the kitchen table with an acoustic guitar" — I think it's fine to reframe the surface details so that they become the substance. But, to echo what I said about Home is in Your Head, the surface details of this production seem a very much locked in their time now.