There are a number of fine albums scattered throughout Warren DeFever's curious and eccentric discography, but my favorite work of his has always been the first few His Name is Alive albums. King of Sweet, now reissued, is a fake bootleg of sorts dating from that extremely fertile period.  While it contains obvious snatches of Home is in Your Head and some later work, everything has been recontextualized, repurposed, and abstracted to such a degree that it seems completely fresh and new.  The fact that a "lost" album from HNIA's golden years has finally resurfaced after nearly two decades is certainly cause for excitement, but the real revelation here is that it just might be DeFever's masterpiece.
Handmade Birds/Silver Mountain Media
The history of this album is somewhat strange and shadowy, as it was initially released by Perdition Plastics in 1993 as a purported compilation of cassette releases spanning from 1990 to 1992.  This claim is repeated on the current Handmade Birds vinyl reissue sleeve, but the Handmade Birds and Silver Mountain Media websites both state that it is actually culled from early recordings and demos of Home is in Your Head.  The reality is probably that both are true: Warren recorded (and possibly released) a string of extremely limited tapes (Hucklebuck, Love Can't Buy Happiness, Blissfield, Mouth, and New Stars, New Tongue) that were ultimately cannibalized, revisited, and perfected over the next several years.  The end result does not sound at all like a batch of unrelated pieces that were thrown together, however.  While there are few songs that could possibly pass for singles ("Weekend," for example), this album is such a coherent, flowing whole that it demands to be listened to in its entirely.
Yet another interesting facet to the story is that the first two His Name is Alive albums (Livonia and the aforementioned Home) were mixed and edited into "proper albums" by Ivo Watts-Russell and Jon Fryer after DeFever finished them.  Consequently, it is likely that the more surreal and collage-like King of Sweet is a more accurate depiction of DeFever's vision at the time than his formal 4AD releases.  At the very least, Warren was fond enough of the album to remaster, extend, and reissue it on his own label in 2005.
King of Sweet is dreamlike and experimental in a way that can probably only be achieved through years of endless tweaking and reediting, as it manages to be uncompromisingly weird and psychedelic while still maintaining strong hooks and an appealing pop sensibility.  These are undeniably catchy songs, but the genius is that they don't sound even remotely like they were performed by a band playing together in a room.  Nothing quite sounds like it is expected to: sounds pan, drop out, or swell unpredictably; vocals layer, echo, and dissipate; structures appear and dissolve; some birds and crickets turn up; the drummer sounds like he is playing in a different band several houses away; everything suddenly starts playing backwards; a funky hip hop loop drifts into an melancholy ambient passage; the band abruptly launches into a Neil Young riff...pretty much anything is possible at any time.  Yet somehow it all sounds perfectly natural in an unnatural way.  As bizarre and fractured as everything is, it still feels strangely comforting and familiar.  The secret (or one of them, at least) seems to be that there are many threads that reappear throughout the album to link everything together.  The most obvious one is that the refrain from Home is in Your Head's "Are You Coming Down this Weekend?" pops up in three or four songs, but I am sure there are many, many others.  This is an album that could take years to fully deconstruct.
Obviously, a double album of collaged alternate takes has the potential to get extremely boring extremely quickly, and I would probably avoid such a thing in most other cases (though I think Swans and Current 93 could pull it off).  However, this is clearly the album that DeFever was born to make.  Everything His Name is Alive excelled at in the early '90s (chanted, somnambulant-sounding female vocals; strangely disjointed instrumentation; haunting melodies, artful layering and processing; unexpected snarls of noise, etc.) lends itself extremely well to a warm and bittersweet long-form suite of deep, enveloping psychedelia such as this.  I do not foresee myself growing tired of this any time in the near future.  King of Sweet is absolutely essential.
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