His Name Is Alive – Hope Is A Candle: Home Recordings 1985 – 1990 / A Silver Thread: Home Recordings 1979 – 1990

Disciples

The beginnings of a thing are rarely seen, beyond its creator and co-conspirators, an initial spark so easily buried in the bushfire it nourishes; so it’s something of a privilege to soak up the plenitude of ideas that would give His Name Is Alive their distinctive play of light and shade.

These recent archival finds have certainly been an eye-opener to the creative force that underpins the band (even before it existed), Warren Defever. From the drifting elegance of the first volume to the acerbic gravities of the second, each instalment brimmed with rewarding twists ‘n’ turns, and now this third (and final) album, Hope Is A Candle, begins to stitch the fragments together, still sketchbook-like and ghostly, but boy, right from the offset the apparitional wafts of their 4AD debut Livona are unmistakable.

I think this one’s my favourite of the trilogy. The campanologist clamber of “Princess” chimes in a dreamlike phantom of “Some And I”, its bewitching simplicity slipping into the shin-kicked snare of a dislocated “E-Nicolle”-like “Either”, and “Coldless” does too, like the persuasively playful glances that would later float on under some bewitching vox. Then the gazelled “Liadin” steals my heart completely in warm silvery tongues of guitar, that gleaming Cocteau Twins-esque bloom you can’t quite pin down, eternally tender, full of torn reflections eking back to a misty shoreline.

Yeah, this is really good, compositionally strong stuff that nourishes a lovely orchestral bite in which skew-whiff melodies mottle your consciousness like the pastel hues of Urszula Broll’s inner world swimming from the speakers, throwing you back in vaporising trails and marbleised stabs. A dreamy countenance that the slumberous slide of “Still” imparts, as if the glint of sunshine were rivering the skin as its harmonics arrow and concentrically curl to creep into the over-saturated glee of “Halo”. It’s a sound that pendants your heart as it flowers in your ear in backward glare and sparking blue metallics, and a satisfying sizzle that leaves the album’s closer “Insiders” to pull your eyelids down on a warm diamond day reminiscence.

Now if this wasn’t fitting finale enough, Disciples have topped things off by adding an accompanying 4CD celebratory set (for all you digital lovers out there) called A Silver Thread that not only compiles the trilogy together, but squeezes in an extra bonus disc too. Keep The Moon On Time comprises the “best” from the cassette releases that peppered each album of home recordings’ release, and for me this is the absolute cherry, providing a trickling thaw of rheumatic drones and corroded beatbox action, its superb opener stabbing expansively skyward, to empty you out into a plenitude of gossamered candy to come.

Some tracks are romantically pillowing like “6teen Secrets”, others caustically bucolic, an emotive patchwork of weathered ambience that weasels wordlessly into your imagination in meditating loops and feisty guitar injury. . This is perhaps a journey’s end, though it feels anything but.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-