Ack Phhht!

I’ve been listening to the Church for twenty years — including a fairly fanatical period in the late 80’s and early 90’s — so it’s a little pathetic that this was my first time seeing them live.  Going in, I wasn’t sure what to expect:  on the one hand, it’s been twenty years since “Under The Milky Way”, the band’s lone Top 40 hit, and fifteen years since their last major label release.  On the other hand, they never stopped working or recording, and have produced a large body of good-to-great albums since then.  So I didn’t know if I was going to see a nostalgia act or a working band promoting their new album.

As it turned out, they opted for a middle route, drawing equally from both their classic 80’s run of albums (nine songs) and their more recent material (eight).  Oddly, twelve of the seventeen songs came off of just three albums — this year’s Untitled #23, 1988’s Starfish, and 1982’s The Blurred Crusade.  And sadly, there was nothing at all from their 90’s albums, not even 1992’s Priest = Aura, arguably their best album.  (Looking at the band’s setlists over the years here, it looks like the band radically changes their setlists from tour to tour, and it doesn’t appear that they have any particular grudge against the 90’s.)

The set started with a muscular rendition of “Tantalized”, a big rocker off 1985’s Heyday.  By the time they got to Starfish’s “North, South, East and West” four songs in, it was clear that live, the band still liked to rock, no matter how cerebral and spacey their studio output has become.  The new material seemed to work well live, although I wasn’t very familiar with it — I’d only picked up Untitled #23 a week before the show and hadn’t really gotten to know the songs yet (although “Space Saviour”, which had made the strongest impression on me on the album due to an unusually forceful vocal by Steve Kilbey, also caught my ear live).  Likewise the two songs off 2006’s Uninvited, Like the Clouds — one of the gaps in my collection — sounded good if a bit indistinct, but it was hard to judge when they were sandwiched between songs that I’ve owned since I was 17 and have listened to hundreds of times.  The only other recent track in the set was actually the show’s highlight for me, a fantastic rendition of “After Everything” off 2002’s After Everything Now This(possibly my favorite Church album, and certainly in my Top 3).

The older material sounded good too, and the band seemed to be having fun (hmm, well I’m not sure about Peter Koppes, he looked pretty dour the whole show).  They obviously didn’t hit all my favorites from the era (it would have hardly been possible), but they hit enough of them:  “Almost With You”, “A Month Of Sundays”, the afore-mentioned “North, South, East, and West”.  I particularly appreciated the fact that Kilbey seemed to be giving the vocals his all and not goofing up or trivializing them, something you often see when a guy is singing a song that he’s played live a thousand times and is just sick to death of (he did tend to over-project in his singing at points, losing that pleasingly smooth, almost somnolent, quality that he gets on the records, but why quibble?).  I’d expected Kilbey to be much more spacey, based on a couple visits to his blog, but he was actually quite engaging and funny — though a fifteen minute delay caused by technical issues did stretch the banter to the breaking point.

Anyway:  awesome show, and it fills me with shame that I waited so long to see these guys.