HIS NAME IS ALIVE
Last Night
4AD/ Beggars Banquet
BILL WELLS & ISOBEL CAMPBELL
Ghosts of Yesterday
Creeping Bent
· The past revisited and, occasionally, reinvented.
Lately, I have been thinking of getting the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on CD. Of course, I've heard it all before, many times over, but that was some time ago, and I've grown curious as to how far remembrance has slipped from reality – it seems to me that there might be something interesting to be found in that gap.
Warren Defever, the man behind His Name Is Alive, has nothing to do with the Beatles, but shares this interest in the gap opened by memory – for most of the last decade he has been playing around with bits and pieces of ’60s American pop, first with everything from the Beach Boys to Big Star, and then, after hooking up with vocalist Lovetta Pippen, soul and R and B.
Tentative and sketchy, Defever's music is often and understandably apologetic, gaining confidence only on those occasions when he is able to go a little beyond his models – for example, his gorgeously orchestrated recreation of "Blue Moon," or the lightly electro-jazz title track of last year's Someday My Blues Will Cover The Earth.
Last Night contains few such moments, although it tries. Instrumental and vocal tracks are unusually long for this habitual miniaturist, frequently exceeding six minutes. These are more in the nature of loose jams than carefully constructed compositions, but the low-fi production and Defever's guitar playing lack the fire and imagination to carry them off. It's the shorter pieces that work best – the lovely ballad "Maybe," and some brief instrumentals that evoke the originals without forcing direct and unflattering comparisons. Retro pastiche has a market, and those who expect nothing more will have no cause for complaint.
Bill Wells's and Isobel Campbell's Ghost of Yesterday comes a lot closer to what an experiment in recollection should be. Wells and Campbell are better known as part of Scots twee-popsters Belle & Sebastian, which should immediately disqualify them from attempting a set of Billie Holiday tunes, but they make the most of this discrepancy. Wells's settings tend to ambient electronic, and Campbell's delicate, faded voice, fully conscious of its limitations, keeps out of the spotlight and doesn't outstay its welcome. Inevitably, Ghost of Yesterday is cute, but it's also so different from Holiday's classic renditions that it reopens her music – which, though timeless, seemed definitively shaped and sealed in the past – to new possibilities.
HIS NAME IS ALIVE 3/5
BILL WELLS & ISOBEL CAMPBELL 4/5
TIMOTHY HECK
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