His Name Is Alive: "Summer Bird" EP

Reliably mystifying indie auteur Warn Defever's band His Name Is Alive has the four tracks of the "Summer Bird" EP available for free download for a limited time on their Web site. The title track is, Defever writes, "a 1970s singer-songwriter flavored track written about lost love using Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge's complete destruction of Cambodia as a metaphor." As usual with Defever, his bizarre production decisions lead to some wonderful sounds -- the Dirty Dozen Brass Band meets Yo La Tengo jam on "Last Summer," the series of Steve Reichian textures that ends "Get Your Curse" -- but make for music that's easy to be intrigued by but hard, at least for me, to love.