His Name Is Alive, "Firefly DragonFly"
HNIA have the ability to weave music out of the wispiest of substances, with every note issuing from their music seeming veritably to shine with the brightest of lights. This four-track EP is no exception, with delicacy and sparkling coruscations tumbling deliciously and lazily from the speakers, and scattershot glints pinging off in all directions.
The first time I heard them was nigh on two decades ago now on their debut Livonia album on 4AD, which I must have played until it wore out, so many times did it visit my turntable. Back then I was struck by the melodic and experimental originality that Warren Defever and cohorts displayed, imbuing their music with a diamantine brilliance and liquid sensuality that augured well for the band’s future; indeed this was consequently borne out, HNIA becoming one of this notable and influential English label’s biggest-selling acts. All these years later, when perhaps many a lesser band would have comfortably settled back into formulaic security and banality, HNIA still invents new ways to delight and startle us, simultaneously retaining that sensuality and liquidity that initially brought them to the attention of the record buying public.
There’s a filmy insubstantiality about HNIA’s music, despite the traditional instrumentality of piano, guitar, double bass, and bells (along with the more unusual, such as the shruit box), that effectively encapsulates longing (and nostalgia even), as if what’s there can only be seen in the corner of the eye, and should one look at it head-on, that very insubstantiality will immediately dissipate and leave nothing but gossamer threads floating away on the breeze. Add in Andy FM’s softly dream-like vocals, a voice whose qualities could only be supported by the liquidity and sensuality of music such as this, and a voice that could just as easily be broken by anything stronger than the lightest of whispering winds, and the impression of a long-ago time and place that’s never to be found again is complete. Yet for all that gauziness and delicacy, the music is lit up with a brightness bordering on the dazzling, albeit shot through perhaps with a sense of melancholy and poignancy that injects a sense of the bittersweet.
The first three songs (“I Can See a Lot of Light in You” [a reworking of Sufjan Steven’s “The Dress Looks Nice on You”]), “Come Out of the Wilderness,” and “There’s Something Between Us and He’s Changing My Words”) are the essential core of the EP, and are heavily pregnant with nostalgia and longing, if not a sense of regret and sorrow. There’s an overarching sense of unrequited love, replete with unresolved feelings and unfulfilled emotions, furthermore that progress-halting brick walls and fences have been met with. There is hope, but tinged with a great deal of sadness; these songs are laved in the salt tears of forlorn hope and inevitably find their home and solace deep in the heart.
The one disappointment on here is the last track, “Send Me a Dragonfly,” a long, meandering 14-minute instrumental that, in spite of its coruscating piano lines and glittering bells and chimes, ultimately seems to be a tad on the self-indulgent and self-reverential side, and consequently seems to go nowhere. After those first three uplifting songs, somehow the thread seems to have snapped and unravelled, leaving the feelings engendered by those initial songs very much frayed around the edges and ragged. Perhaps it should have been reined in and snipped off at half its length; better still, it could have been left off altogether.
HNIA have proven themselves consummate at distilling the essence of intangible emotion, and creating from that essence works which both illuminate, and that are capable of deeply wounding the listener. Love can be a messy affair at the best of times, even when going smoothly; unrequited and unreturned feelings can inflict the deepest cuts of all. It requires a special kind of artist to create music that can delineate the rawness without mawkishness and simultaneously with complete authenticity; on that count, at least for those first three songs, HNIA do it admirably.
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