Untitled #23
by The Church
REVIEWS and COMMENTS
Throughout their 30-year career, Australian band the Church have been in and out of the spotlight thanks to a few hit records and a devoted following that has been tested by some of the group's less memorable efforts. Yet 2009 looks to be a very notable year for the band, thanks to a couple of solo albums from core members Steve Kilbey and Marty Willson-Piper, plus the release of the band's 23rd album. Untitled #23 isn't a radical departure from where the band have been heading recently but everything falls into place this time. The songs are given time to develop and meander, plus their more psychedelic side is allowed to come to the forefront. While the overall mood is melancholic, songs like opener "Cobalt Blue" or "Happenstance," with its chiming guitars, stop the proceedings from getting too dark despite the vividness of the lyrics. Untitled #23 captures the band at the height of their renaissance; it doesn't have a single weak spot and just might be the best album they've ever released.
★★★★★★★★ (8 stars out of 10)
Patience is a virtue. If you disagree then you won't ever appreciate the almost 30-year-old Aussie band the Church, much less their recent exemplar of dream rock patience, Untitled #23. Right from their 1981 debut, Of Skins and Heart, singer-lyricist Steve Kilbey established his trademark deep melancholic vocals and rather oblique (often dubbed "surrealist") lyrics. While Kilbey never really changed that much, the Church moved increasingly spacier and less pop-rock on a number of efforts from then until now, with the exception of their major commercial breakthrough, 1988's Starfish, and some bizarre flirtations with dance music on 2002's Parallel Universe. 22 albums later, the Church give us one of their very best—meticulously wrought, mildly hallucinatory musicscapes marked by an unrepentant infatuation with fantasy and dreams, serendipity and fear, melancholy and hope.
There's a very good case to be made that getting dropped by their major label in the early '90s was the best thing to ever happen to The Church. Freed from the stultifying pressure to produce hit singles, the Aussie space-rock quartet have, ever since, been free to guide their trademark psych-jangle down all manner of dark and increasingly obscure thoroughfares, creating some of the best music of their career in the process
Listening back to some of their more recent discs - the hazy, widescreen psychedelia of Forget Yourself (2003) for instance - one is struck by how utterly unique the band's sound has become, how completely all their stylistic, artistic and literary influences have now been sublimated.
Which brings us to Untitled #23, one of The Church's most accomplished and richly textured releases yet. The resolutely languid pace (Deadman's Hand, which summons the arpeggiated twin guitar chime of old, is the only song that you might say "rocks") lends these songs a dreamlike, hallucinogenic grace, while guitarists Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes have rarely employed such a varied palette of guitar tones while still leaving plenty of space for the songs to breathe. Bassist/lyricist Steve Kilbey, meanwhile, contributes some career-best vocal performances - his rich baritone urgent and rapsy on the hypnotic Space Saviour, delicate and mellifluous on the gently cascading closer Operetta. He even channels his late friend Grant McLennan in the dramatic denouement to Anchorage.
But what really distinguishes the record is the band's renewed emphasis on song structure and melody - from the unpredictable snaky chord progression of opener Cobalt Blue to the tumbling, blissful chorus of first single Pangaea, the music here drifts through an ever-changing tunnel of acid-bath guitarchitecture but always asserts the primacy of concise songcraft.
Few bands can claim to be producing their best work nearly 30 years into their career - thank goodness The Church are one such band. Untitled #23 is kaleidoscopic but accessible, tightly focused psych-pop brilliance.
Old dogs can teach themselves new tricks. Thirty years into their career - and 20 years after their brief commercial peak - The Church have recorded one of their most striking albums yet, a genuine psychedelic masterpiece. Untitled #23 retains all The Church's hallmarks - the warm, effusive melodies; the complex guitar interplay; the surprising tangents - but it strikes a tone distinct from anything else in their discography. The band resists playing to their usual strengths for shimmering guitar-pop or grandiose, surround-sound rock, and instead attempts something less immediate. Untitled #23 is resigned and melancholic, its guitars restrained and its hooks hidden behind a shadowy, psychedelic haze. It's a Rorschach inkblot of an album, and each listen lends itself to new discoveries and interpretations.
★★★★★★★★ (8 stars out of 10)
If the title seems somewhat ambiguous, suffice it to say it's also appropriate, albeit it in a bizarre sort of way. Over the course of a twenty-year career [30-year, actually], the Church has procured a hazy cosmic sheen that tilts towards psychedelia with an unusually amorphous set-up that seems ever so intent on leaving the listener guessing. Hardly surprising, then, that one of their earliest albums was called The Blurred Crusade.
Hardly surprising either that this time around the band once again opts for their usual blend of sprawling melodies, ethereal arrangements and ruminating deliberations. The eerie, otherworldly mystique of "Pangaea," "Deadman's Hand" and "On Angel Street" sound as if they were beamed down from a distant galaxy, but fortunately, the pulsating tempos and darker designs manage to maintain enough tension that keep the songs somewhat compelling. Still, it's the rare offering that find the foursome breaking out of the atmospherics and attempting something more than a mere drift through another droning mélange. By far the best of these attempts arrives in the form of "Space Savior," a song that starts sounding somewhat understated but promptly builds towards an insistent crescendo.
Those willing to commit to repeated listens will likely derive a greater degree of satisfaction, as ultimately it takes more than a cursory hearing for the Church to attract a new believer.
Standout tracks: Space Savior," "On Angel Street"
Untitled #23 is an appropriately vague title for an impressionistic work that merits close attention, as Australian dreampop quartet The Church haven't made a poor record in ages. As pulsing synthesizer suggests the unsettling intrusion of a distant car alarm, "On Angel Street" undulates like a half-remembered dream of Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine." Steve Kilbey's audio-film noir plays about the emotionally raw edges of an unraveling relationship. "Deadman's Hand" is a foreboding portrait of oppression, reclaiming the sinister spookiness of 1992's overlooked Priest=Aura. Kilbey's monotone vocal hypnotizes as guitars intertwine with serpentine melodies and jagged licks, while Tim Powles' stately drumming underpins "Happenstance," which glints and shimmers like calm ocean wavelets, and Peter Koppes' whale-call guitar glides heavenly beneath the surface. Ah.
REVERED ROCKERS
Legendary Oz band The Church outdo themselves on their superb new album
A Renewed Crusade
The Church return to form with a stunningly ambitious album of shimmering rock
The Church - Untitled #23 (Unorthodox/MGM) ★★★★★ (5 out of 5 stars)
While many of their contemporaries are coming out of retirement and dusting off their Eighties hits for reunion tours, the Church, like Nick Cave, have never called it quits, instead continuing to evolve and experiment with music in a way that puts "cutting edge" rock dinosaurs like U2 to shame. The band have deftly kept the key elements of their trademark sound constant, allowing them to try all manner of experiments around the edges without ever alienating or confusing their die-hard fans. Untitled #23 is their most accessible album in recent years, but it's no less ambitious than recent efforts. Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes's guitars bubble, scrape and swirl in layers so dense that it takes multiple listens to appreciate the complexity of the arrangements. Amazingly, Steve Kilbey's instantly recognisable voice and off-kilter phrasing cuts through even the most murky passages, showing studio-smarts that are seldom seen these days outside of Sigur Rós recordings. Like My Bloody Valentine and the aforementioned Icelanders, the Church know that even the most sonically extreme psychedelia needs to be anchored with a solid melodic idea, and this is where Kilbey earns his stripes as one of the country's most underrated songwriters. You have to admire the Church's stubborn refusal to cash in on their early success and do the whole nostalgia rock circuit thing. By hanging everything on the faith that their best work is still ahead of them, the Church sound every bit as relevant now as they did way back in 1987. Their new songs sound emotional, raw and at times even scarily angry, without ever sounding like they're trying to conjure up demons-long banished by years of comfortable living and golfing trips. Even those with a short attention span will find enough immediacy in their sound to remind them that the band that penned one of Australia's unofficial national anthems "Under the Milky Way" won't be appearing at a leagues club near you anytime soon. - MATT COYTE
Absolutely mesmerizing. I had no idea The Church still had a record like this in them. Untitled #23 is hands down their best since Heyday, and it gives that one a run for the money. I was so floored I began composing this review before the disc even ended.
One of the things that makes these songs so good is their textured sound. The majestic pop of "Already Yesterday" or "Under The Milky Way" was a thing of beauty, no question. But that style dated very quickly, which is one of the reasons they had such difficulty following up their early success.
The atmospheres The Church toyed with back in the day have now fully matured. Untitled #23 is a dark dream of a record, hypnotic almost. The opening track "Cobalt Blue" draws the listener in immediately. With Marty Willson-Piper's chiming guitars framing Steve Kilbey's haunting refrain "Let it go, let it go" the results are riveting.
"Pangaea" and "Space Saviour" continue the mood, but it is with "On Angel Street" that this record becomes triumphant. It is a film noir journey through Kilbey's subconscious, as he ruminates on a relationship's end. This is the most personal song I have heard in ages, an achingly beautiful piece of music.
"Anchorage" is another peak, the interplay between the band is just incredibly tight as the song builds to it's climax. "Operetta" closes things out as they began, with swirling guitars framing stream of conscious lyrics, as only The Church can do.
Given the band's spotty record since Starfish, I thought they might have front loaded the best tracks, and I kept waiting for the clunkers to appear. There are none on Untitled #23. To record what is quite possibly their best album ever after nearly 30 years together is an extraordinary achievement.
It is also one hell of a record. I wish I knew the significance of the title, but like everything else here, it really does not matter. All that matters is the music, and in that regard The Church have hit a home run.