First and foremost, I am convinced that all someone needs to do is sample the entirety of the seven-second first track -- "Are You Comin' Down This Weekend?," sung by Karin Oliver in just the right way and pace, and totally a capella -- and then create what would without doubt be the world's best ever get out of your head and ripped on something modern dancefloor anthem forever and ever, amen. It would be the new "I Feel Love," I tell you.
This aside -- Warren Defever is one of Those People, the ones who whole up somewhere and do eight million projects and produce things and have no one identifiable sound and doesn't care what you think, but who knows a lot of people who like him and work with him. That type of thing. In this case the place is Michigan, and while it would be a bit much to assume that he inadvertantly started the whole space/postrock scene of the nineties there singlehandedly -- because he didn't, and he's never really been associated with any of that -- he is nonetheless a patron saint in ways, a friendly arty nutty kinda guy.
As for his main band, His Name is Alive -- strictly a band in name only, really, since it all revolves around Warren and whatever he's doing. The most recent album sounds nothing like the first, and that's a fine thing. But by signing to 4AD certain expectations were brought to the fore, and the thing about Home, officially the second album, is that it confirms and trashes them all at once, and gleefully so.
I like to think of Home as being what a lot of the rhetoric of the time claimed for lo-fi, especially the 'inventive' types who supposedly addressed a whole bunch of different styles and sounds, but which was never really delivered by many of the sacred cows. Fragmentary and proud of it -- songs instantly blend into each other, things shift just like that, rockin' garage tunes instantly change into empty etherealness -- Home sounds like a lot of things sitting around and stuck together in new shapes because the old ones were a bit on the typical side.
This said, Home isn't per se experimentalism run riot. The changes and dichotomies here are more contextual than anything else, overlaid by a general gentleness which Ivo Watts-Russell no doubt brought in thanks to his mixing. But there aren't many rock records then or now which sound like a hip-hop album's sequencing, with sudden fragments and weird repositionings just happening because they could, without sounding like hip-hop in the slightest. Or like Wire, alternately, even though the stop-start nature of what's going on isn't so far removed from either Pink Flag or 154 when you think about it, in a way sorta kinda that's very indirect.
So you get acoustic rambles and bits of what could be the best art/folk/pop songs ever and strange electric noises in the backgrounds and sudden screams and drum machines and kids chanting "Put your finger in your eye" and not drum machines and an amazing instrumental bit of sweetness called "Sitting Still Moving Still Staring Outlooking" and lyrics like "Are we still married?/I'm tired of getting shot at." Not to mention a cover of a Ritchie Blackmore/Ronnie James Dio tune, "Man on the Silver Mountain," done as a barely-there bit of understated niceness. These are all good things. It's why I like this album a lot.