Another archival trip into His Name Is Alive‘s formative years, and a follow up to last year’s excellent All The Mirrors In The House, Return To Never is an altogether darker/noiser joy, that (as on the previous LP) spreads out as a whole, although segmented into individual tracks.
The first half deals a sycamore drone weathered in hissy ferrics, spiralling your attention in grainy gravities that go all concrète, sonically tripping on a tectonic tide. Again the Michigan lakes figure as an inexhaustible sound source, here exorcised into a distorted aura, a swelling tide, bouldering in white spray to create a visual feast that has you plunging its visceral depths.
This faint atonal harmony reveals itself, growing out into absent-minded guitar that seems to untether itself (and you) as it latches into something otherworldly. Diaphanous doubles eaten on strumming reverbs, slow wavering feedbacks that hit home, cusp oblivion as your ear is caressed by hints of all those joys that were yet to come, something that has me half-expecting Karin Oliver to be siren-surfing.
These are sounds that pull at you and mess with your head in a seriously medicating way. The funnel-worming greyness of it all weaving a strangely and seductive vocabulary. That ethereal guitar blissfully blurring in multiples, those saturated field recordings degraded with discovery, even the beaty salvos of noise-pop that are seemingly swallowed by an opaque horizon. These are sounds that go far beyond their humble origins, pulsate hungrily in your mind’s eye, a place where past and future collide to sweetly detach you from both. Return To Never is another fascinating journey to treasure, and I can only imagine what the final instalment has to offer.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
