Pitchfork

His Name Is Alive founder Warn Defever seems to think he can tackle any genre. On his late 90s solo records, he posed as a modern country troubadour a la Will Oldham, using digital effects to sonically backdate the material somewhere in the 1940s. He's also weighed in on the neo-classicism purported by Rachel's, with When the Stars Refuse to Shine (2000) and When Flowers Covered the Earth (2002), both made available by Time Stereo, the tiny Livonia, MI label dedicated to releasing everything Defever commits to tape.

Warn (then known as Warren) started His Name Is Alive in the late 80s; their 1990 debut Livonia was an embarrassing impersonation of 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell's band This Mortal Coil, but for a bunch of kids just out of high school, HNIA were way ahead of the game. They developed an adorably romantic, homegrown sound on 1993's Mouth by Mouth and perfected it on the lush, heartbreaking 1996 LP Stars on E.S.P.. Defever took a subsequent and unsettling turn toward pop aspirations with 1998's Ft. Lake, a record totally overproduced by Steve King, who's worked with Aretha Franklin, Funkadelic, and more recently, Eminem, engineering The Eminem Show. "Don't Glue the World" and "How It's Gotta Be" were vintage HNIA, and "Everything Takes Forever" added a great funk tinge to their nostalgic Americana, but Ft. Lake was dotted with ugly and obvious mainstream forays like the Hendrix knockoff "Wish I Had a Wishing Ring", one of the worst songs they've ever recorded.

Unsurprisingly, Last Night was promoted with excuses, shirked off as a collection of tunes recorded during rehearsals for their tour in support of Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth, His Name Is Alive's disastrous 2001 attempt at straight R&B (offset by a pair of Etta James tributes). Last Night is even more chaotic, and shoulders some of the same fakebook mistakes they've been making for the last five years, but it also contains moments of brilliance on par with "Sound System Wants It Sweet", the incongruous, genius reggae tune from 1997's You Need a Heart to Live (an impossibly rare Friendly Science seven-inch EP).

Last Night's eight-minute title track could be the finest piece of experimental pop reggae since Andy Summers put away his 1963 Custom Telecaster. Mixing chorused offbeat strumming with a pinch of Cuban rhythm, "Last Night" is at once melancholy, serene and assured, invoking the wistful island funk of Sade, The Police and Talking Heads. It blends seamlessly into "Crawlin'", a fine piece of dub with the requisite rimshot delay, accented by flamenco chords and soul solo at its core.

On Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth, the group reprised the haunting dirge "Are We Still Married?" from their sophomore album Home Is In Your Head. It was a ghastly and melodramatic exploitation of a previously poignant, understated chant, but there's ample penance for this misappropriation on Last Night: "Devil's Night" and "Do You Want to Come to My Party?" are welcome, honest reminders of the earlier, acoustic HNIA sound. Their cover of Ida's "Maybe" straddles the old and the new, with flanged cymbal washes buried deep behind straight guitars and muted tom rolls. Lovetta Pippen's classic soul voice-- she's a former gospel singer-- winds back and forth between the simpler, sadder His Name of old and the too-affected blues warble so few HNIA fans have been able to get past since she came onboard with Ft. Lake.

Like Someday, Last Night features morose violin and piano interludes, culled from Defever's recent work with Ida, and rooted in the mid-90s Chicago string sound. He succinctly explores this fixation on "I Been Good Up Till Now", a three-minute, wandering dirge grounded by a vibrato electric piano. Fans of this material should definitely seek out his full-length expositions available from Time Stereo; it's great material inspired by the monotony of Gavin Bryars' most famous pieces, but it's mostly displaced and weakened by the recently uneven material it bridges.

The funk and soul pretensions that ruined the last two HNIA records come home to roost on "I Have Special Powers", an awful cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Storm", and the 11-minute "Someday My Prince Will Come", which steals most of its moves from Stevie Wonder's Innervisions. If you can forget about these three over-the-top reminders of what's gone wrong with His Name Is Alive, Last Night contains the best material they've recorded since Stars On E.S.P., the crucial, defining album Warren Defever now bears as a cross.