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Source: Musician Magazine (New York, NY, USA)
Issue: No. 190 Date: Aug, 1994
Subject: Review - Sometime Anywhere
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THE CHURCH SOMETIME, ANYWHERE (ARISTA)
By Tom Lanham

If Roger Waters had never left Pink Floyd, what would the band sound like today? Chances are, a lot less like the tranquilized Division Bell and more like the tranquil Aussie outfit the Church, on its dreamy, dreary new Arista disc Sometime, Anywhere. Pared down to a core duo of cynical singer/ lyricist Steve Kilbey (the Waters figure) and fluid, filigreed guitarist Marty Willson-Piper (who approximates the Floyd's David Gilmour in tone and texture), the once- jangling group has summoned up a surreal, bewitching mood piece somewhere between Wish You Were Here and The Wall, and album that would play well by candlelight in a hilltop haunted mansion.

A couple of segments clog Kilbey's slow- pulsing artery - the clumsy, veiled vitriol of "The Maven" and the disjointed Willson-Piper vocal exercise "Fly Home", for instance. But he wheezes so suggestively from delicate six- string- and- synthesizer platforms like "Day of the Dead", "Lost My Touch" and "My little Problem", you're immediately drawn in. As far back as 1981's definitive, "The Unguarded Moment", Kilbey was sneering on most of humanity, and now it's become his stock in trade: Stepping over the dainty guitar notes of "Lullaby," he hisses, "A doom is on this child, that I can see / He don't belong in this time with you and me / His life will not be very long / Before you know it, he will be gone." Not your standard children's bedtime fare. In the flamenco- tempered "Loveblind," he's a hardboiled detective piecing "together clue by clue / just what a faceless man would do." And- surprise!- the singer himself is the faceless man at the song's film- noirish finale.

Throughout the set, ethereal female backing vocals waft in, a la Dark Side of the Moon, and underscore Sometime Anywhere's somber Floydian themes. And it's obvious - even on a mostly forgettable seven-track bonus disk - that Kilbey and Willson-Piper need each other for yin-yang balance, a lesson Waters and Gilmour seem to have long ago forgotten.

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