UNINVITED, LIKE THE CLOUDS PRESS RELEASE

Ladies, gentlemen, enthusiasts, detractors, obsessive collectors, curious novices... several facts were employed in the making of this Church record. Some are herewith assembled in good faith. But as ever in this perpetual labyrinth of sound and imagination, the truth is likely to remain unperceived.

This intriguing state of suspension should be familiar to those who have followed this band's remarkable journey from Sydney 1980 to their current, peerless and stateless location best described as Sometime, Anywhere.

Uninvited, Like the Clouds is their tenth, thirteenth, twentieth or umpteenth album, depending on how you choose to count them. It arrived, as its title may suggest, by colliding accidents of fate and atmospheric pressure.

It was received, played and produced by Steve Kilbey, Peter Koppes, Tim Powles and Marty Willson-Piper, with select guests, in the summertime, at Spacejunk 1 and Dodgy Sound studios in Sydney.

The Spacejunk sessions largely centred on the random, self-generating process of live interaction that spawned two recent, highly regarded Church albums, After Everything Now This and Forget Yourself. The Dodgy sessions were generally more considered, structured and traditional.

Perhaps as a result, the album's expansive textures and arresting melodies form a kind of bridge between the euphoric pop of the band's fortuitous radio intrusions (see "Almost With You", "Metropolis", "Under the Milky Way") and the ominous, unsettled light of their more kaleidoscopic art-rock trips.

Hence "Block", a dramatic course through metaphysical traffic and fever from Miracle Street to Hyperion, a song like a slow dream of falling through a mutating vortex of guitars. And its polar opposite, "Easy": a briefly shimmering sun shower with an updraft of promise and trilling mandolin.

The Church's infinite spectrum of colours spans here from the sinister shards and magma of "Space Needle" to the opiated drift of "Pure Chance", a cool surrender to a mermaid's song.

"Real Toggle Action" is a fragmented ice-scape with a chilling dose of deep space blues, "Untoward" a nightmarish inner dialogue on smart drugs, the blissful "Unified Field" perhaps the band's most summery, exuberant and plain catchy tune of the last decade or more.

Willson-Piper's "She'll Come Back For You Tomorrow" revisits and updates a recurring theme in the Church's big book of dreams, one in which nameless muses tease and hypnotise then vanish like mist, flesh and blood turned into imagination and contradiction.

Less familiar to the Church's ethereal palette are some quite modern and earthbound images, notably the sense of shared isolation that makes "Overview" resonate so vividly: abstract 21st century angst tempered by the perennial hope of the music's swelling sunrise.

Then there's the penultimate entry in this year's space log, "Day 5", one of the band's most gorgeous and intriguing songs to date. It sparks opaque memories, like a random chapter in a continuing story that's left us suspended before, maybe on Séance, Starfish or Priest = Aura.

Throughout the grim, beautiful, disorienting journey, the four cornerstones of the Church continue to greet and defy expectations, Kilbey the receiver of an endless stream of outlandish images, the guitars of Koppes and Willson-Piper spiralling, aquaplaning, morphing and diverging. Powles shares production duties this time to concentrate on drums and percussion.

Like all truths, these basic rules are naturally in permanent flux. In "Song To Go", a guitar is abandoned for a hand-operated pump organ and cellist Sophie Glasson adds a classical counterpoint. David Lane's piano bridges "Overview"; a mercurial, mandolin-like motif binds Koppes' "Never Before"; Powles' additional production continues a sonic thread through the band's last extraordinary decade.

Divine intervention may well have played a part too, but it's refreshingly clear that the prevailing Hot Sound, the convenient market niche and the media-sponsored zeitgeist did not. These flecks of pestilence are too weak and transient to affect the cosmic seeds that the Church sow.

Possibility remains a more alluring mistress than expectation. To some parties, it's best to remain uninvited. Not unlike, say, the clouds.

Michael Dwyer, January 2006