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
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.
, back in 2001 (about a year after it came out), and they’ve come through town several times since then. But I’ve always managed to miss them, thanks to then-girlfriends, overseas travel, and (ahem) not getting around to buying tickets before they sold out. So it was great to finally see them after all this time.
dominated the set, starting off with the spectacular “Jetstream”. About half the main set came off the album, and all the songs came off quite well. The rest of the set pulled off their other three albums, but sadly my personal favorite, Lost Souls, got the short end of the setlist: “Rise” showed up early, but that was it until the encore, when they played “Firesuite” and “Here It Comes” back-to-back. The absence of “The Cedar Room” and “Catch The Sun” saddened me a fair bit, but obviously you can’t expect a band to play your nine year old favorites just because you couldn’t be bothered to catch them live in a more timely manner — and anyway I love Kingdom and wouldn’t have really minded if they just played the album end-to-end and called it a night.
Showing up to 924 Gilman for the first time in twelve years or so was kind of a trip. It sounded like I had a lot of company, though — several people around me in the crowd were saying things along the same lines, drawn back to see Thorns Of Life, the new band featuring Blake Schwarzenbach (Jawbreaker, Jets To Brazil) and Aaron Cometbus (Crimpshrine, Fifteen).
). Hopefully, the band will stick around for a while and I’ll have some more chances to see them play.
, the aforementioned second album. Not everything that I wanted to hear made it in, but most of it did, and I left satisfied. It was a great set, and I hope I don’t have to wait three more years to see them again.
, isn’t bad, but it doesn’t really recapture the majestic roar of their studio albums (though that could just be a low-budget recording job), and Yuki Chikudate’s voice sounds thin at points. But any worries I had about how they would sound were quickly squashed — the music sounded dense and rich (at least from the mezzanine), and while Chikudate struggled here and there to hit the high notes, her voice held up well throughout. The rhythm section was excellent, too, particularly the drummer, who did a good job of duplicating the pounding drum tracks that provide a lot of the momentum on their records. Despite having supposedly finished their new album, most of the songs they played were off their first two records — I counted only three or four new ones (I’m unsure because one song sounded strangely familiar, but I couldn’t place it) amongst the eleven songs in the set. The new songs sounded good, and I’m really looking forward to that new record. The arrangements didn’t vary much from the recorded versions, but the playing was tight and everything sounded great.
, so the set was largely made up of Monk compositions, and was significantly more challenging than I expected, full of Monk’s complex structures and melodies. This wasn’t a bad thing — the group was loose and sometimes playful, and they kept the set riveting even through the twistiest passages. I particularly enjoyed Jason Marsalis’s drumming, which was impressively varied and full of personality. And Ellis Marsalis’s playing was beautiful, fluid and melodic.
