Jeff Miers: Sound Check
Now on 23rd album, the Church shows how to stay inspired
There’s no hiding from that moment when the well runs dry. Things may have been moving along fine — at a rapid creative clip, even — and then suddenly you catch yourself looking over your shoulder. Then, in an instant, it’s over. The past is now larger and more imposing than the future, and you accept striving to reclaim past glories as your destiny from here on out.
It needn’t be this way, necessarily. As Marty Wilson-Piper, tenured guitarist with Australia’s the Church, told the Boston Phoenix last week, “You are only limited by your own limitations,” which is in essence a suggestion that, if you don’t want to turn into a pillar of salt, you shouldn’t glance back over your shoulder toward the city of Sodom. Keep your eyes on the prize, that prize being nothing more nor less than the gift of another today.
Brave words, these mutterings from Wilson-Piper, who — along with his Church band-mates Steve Kilbey, Peter Koppes and Tim Powles — will drop from the heady orbit his band has dwelt within for the better part of 30 years, for a show inside the Tralf Music Hall at 8 p. m. Tuesday.
The notion that the way to stay inspired is to be inspired might seem like so much wishful thinking, had the Church not managed to pull off this very trick across the span of 22 albums in 28 years, the 23rd having just hit the ether, simultaneously providing the group with the impetus for this current tour.
Originally emerging as harbingers of the new “alternative-psychedelic” idiom — I’d hesitate to call it a full-blown movement, since the Church and Echo & the Bunnymen are really the last men standing, now that the metaphorical dry-ice cloud has subsided — the Church seemed to arrive with a fully articulated sound in tow. None of this waffling around in search of a style that would stick for these boys. Rather, the Church presented an instant, full immersion in great big, billowing clouds of lush chords, dreamlike grooves and rather sublime melodies, all combining to suggest the listener had entered a pleasantly surreal state, body in repose, but mind spinning technicolor cartwheels. (This could be embarrasing if anyone was watching, but was great fun alone, with the headphones on. Lava lamp optional, of course.)
It seemed fitting, then, that the first album to catch my ear — and the ears of most other interested non-Australians — was the band’s second album, 1982’s “The Blurred Crusade.” The title fit the music snugly.
The Church stayed a well-kept secret for a good while afterwards, at least as far as the mainstream was concerned. But eventually, erosion worked its magic, the wall collapsed, and the band found itself with a big ol’ hit single, a gorgeous psychedelic folk song that stuck out like a pacifist at an NRA convention, considering that the year was 1987 and hair-metal was still reigning supreme.
“Under the Milky Way” gave the Church a hit album in the form of “Starfish,” but the real victory here was one involving musical integrity; the hit was a fluke, not because the band didn’t deserve one, but because it had managed to make commercial waves without altering the magic that made it great in the first place. Getting a hit on your own terms, without really worrying about it too much? Priceless.
“Starfish” is now rightly considered a classic, but it is only one of many in the Church canon. In fact, by this point, the band stands all but alone as an outfit still comprised of its original members, with an unbroken chain of recordings spanning several decades. The only band able to boast as much is U2. And the Church, as experimental as the best U2 music is and was, has always been further out, more decidedly left-of-the-dial. (Rolling Stone even went so far in its recent review of the new “Untitled #23” album as to suggest that the band has continued “to evolve and experiment with music in a way that puts ‘cutting edge’ rock dinosaurs like U2 to shame.” That might be a cheap shot, but it does raise an interesting point: The Church, by only visiting mass-appeal for a brief stay, has been left alone to do just what it wants to do, commercial concerns be damned.)
That the band is coming to Buffalo on its “Untitled #23” tour is an incredible treat for regional fans, and a booking coup for the concert promoters behind the Tralf engagement. Coming within the same 10- day period where the club has presented avant garde rock pioneers Van der Graaf Generator and multi-idiomatic visionary Todd Rundgren, the Church appearance feels emblematic of a commitment to the more interesting, less obvious streams of rock music in the city’s finest clubs.
Even if it turns out that it isn’t indicative of any broader movement, Tuesday’s Church show promises to be one for the ages. Reports from the road suggest that the band will be pulling songs from throughout its career, and that a healthy dose of the sublime “Untitled #23” will be passed around as well. Thirty years deep, and the well of inspiration still hasn’t run dry for this lot.•
The Church, with special guest Adam Franklin and Bolts of Melody, play the Tralf Music Hall (622 Main St.) at 8 p. m. Tuesday. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster. e-mail: jmiers@buffnews.com
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