The Church - C or D/S&D/CB&TT

I recently read on another website that Marty Wilson Piper has a song called "Forget The Radio" that mentions Robert Wyatt and Andy Partridge. Cue requisite guilt for not having followed his solo career since um...that last album from a long time ago the name of which escapes me...

If that album isn't THE most difficult Church thing I don't know what is.

When they do these old songs like Unguarded Moment I can't figure out if they're being flippant and playing a hilarious joke on me or if they're deadly serious.

Kilbey's blog is really exceptional this time, I think with this Bardo entry:

http://stevekilbey.blogspot.com/

Okay I'm tired of being virtually the only one who wants to talk about the two El Momento discs, El Momento Descuidado & El Momento Siguiente. I honestly do not think they have been this good since Hologram of Baal, freaking 9 years ago, bless their hearts. But I admit the discs are spotty so I have made a comp. of my fave tracks:

1. Wide Open Road (I love how he goes "NOW! You can go anywhere..." it's the perfect romantic heartbreak song, that thing of being in the now and facing a future even though you're stuck painfully in the past)

2. 0408 (I like this one almost as much as "Invisible"...the piano is killer and the acoustic guitar riff is nearly as infectious as "Invisible"'s)

3. That new version of Reptile (oh my god that little scat vocal thing he does at the end is priceless! And the fact that he starts it off with a HISSSS like a snake is fucking classic on top of it)

4. November

5. Chromium (some nice falsetto work from Marty)

6. Song In The Afternoon (this one's pretty hypnotizing, I must say)

7. A New Season (better than the original? maybe not, but damn close)

8. Appalatia

9. Bordello (god, this one is weird, have they ever sounded *that* rock and roll before?? That is some bad ass shit, you half expect Steve to start wearing spandex and rock star sunglasses)

10. Tristesse (every bit as enjoyable as the original, I think)

11. Invisible (my favourite of the lot and a riff that has a tendency to go around and around in my brain incessantly)

12. NSEW (North, South, East, West)(nah, not as good as the original, but it's interesting to hear the lyics clearly)

13. Between Mirages

14. Comeuppance

One complaint with these two discs: the version of Grind pales in comparison to the "Acoustic Version" found on the Terra Nova Cain U.S. promo 12". Uh..available on the internet like everything else.

Bimble - thanks for this, I find these sorts of things very, very helpful. Mostly because I'm too lazy to figure out my own comp! Excellent mix - 7 tracks from each volume, half new and half rerecordings.

So I just finished listening and it's quite fine. 0408 is clearly a standout as is Bordello and Song In The Afternoon. Wide Open Road is a cover - one of the finest songs from Weddings Parties Anything. Not sure about Reptile, though - the original is such a MONSTER that this new version is interesting but desperately missing the soundscape of the original. Agree that Invisible is greatly enhanced, though, with NSEW also benefiting from this treatment.

Meanwhile I'm loving the post-Starfish comp I made (listed unthread with some alterations).

Wide Open Road is a cover - one of the finest songs from Weddings Parties Anything

"Wide Open Road" was done by the Triffids originally. WPA also covered it.

Meantime as long as this is revived, the band sent around this bulletin on Myspace today:

the church created the soundtrack to Shriek, a short film based on the book. The film will be available on the internet next week. World Fantasy Award Winner Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Shriek: An Afterword is out in trade paperback in the U.S. this week.

In the meantime, you can visit the Shriek site http://www.shriekthenovel.com for more information, including a trailer of the film and a couple of soundtrack samples.

Shriek movie trailer : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OC_luLwJ64

More news soon about the Shriek music being available on the internet.

"Being able to get The Church for the soundtrack is a great example of synergy," VanderMeer says. "I wrote the novel while listening to The Church's entire catalogue, so for them to turn around and agree to do the music fit the movie perfectly."

According to Steve Kilbey from The Church, "It's great to make music that'll be heard along with something visual. Collaborating with media other than music sparks ideas for our own music, too." Kilbey and Tim Powles from the band contributed a voice-over for part of the film. Kilbey’s art is also featured."

VanderMeer's previous books have made the year's best lists of Amazon.com, Publishers Weekly, LA Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. He is widely regarded as one of the finest fantasists of his generation, and Shriek: An Afterward was recently hailed as, “Masterful....fans of Mark Z. Danielewski, Angela Carter and Borges will be well rewarded,” in a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

"There came a force so beguiling that even a cold-minded scholar must surrender to it. There came a war so strange that bullets became delicacies. There came a night so terrible no one could name it. And one man’s obsession may hold the key to the survival of a city….An epic yet personal look at several decades of life, love, war, and death in the famed city of Ambergris, the Afterword relates the scandalous, heartbreaking, and horrifying secret history of two squabbling siblings and their confidantes, protectors, and enemies."

“After a moment the creature blushed into a haze of purple-blue-green, then back to gold, but a more vibrant shade. Duncan poured more water over the creature. It seemed to crack apart, fissures erupting across its skin at regular intervals. But no-it was merely opening up, each of its four legs unfurling, to settle upside down on the floor. Immediately, it leapt up, spun, and landed, cilia down, revealed as a kind of starfish.” —From Shriek: An Afterword

what would be more interesting is if the Church recorded the soundtrack for Shrek

"Wide Open Road" was done by the Triffids originally. WPA also covered it.

God, I hate egg on my hipster face. Good on yer for correcting me.

But WPA deserves more mentions on ILM anyway.

OMG Curtis is so right. As I skimmed through that post, my mind read "Shrek" every time. I was really confused.

They're starting to upload various videoclips from last year's tour on their myspace site. Nice.

Does anyone else like Mimesis, this project Steve Kilbey did with Simon Polinski and John Kilbey and other folks? This CD is a real headtrip. Makes me feel like I'm on acid even when totally sober. Actually, though, if Ned hadn't mentioned it, it would have slipped by me totally.

Meantime, the not-bad-at-all neogaze band Tearwave have done a not-bad-at-all cover of "Under the Milky Way" -- on their myspace:

http://myspace.com/tearwave

Hell yeah, that's nice music. Not bad at all. I appreciate the faithfulness of the guitar solo. One of her other songs sounded good, too. Plus, I love her blue hair.

But honestly I'm just amazed that anyone bothered to revive a Church thread besides me. I've felt very alone in my Church love of late. Maybe I should join their mailing list again like I was in '95-'96 or whatever. Assuming they still have a mailing list. They're really one of my absolute fave bands ever on the planet. The weird thing was that whenever something really really painful happened to me in life, suddenly a new album by them was out to sink my sorrow into. This happened three times. But not this year. No, this year I'm just so happy they sound better than ever.

Mr. Odd, I'm sorry I never before looked at your post-Starfish comp. above. I guess I was drunk and missed it before. It's hard to choose tracks from those albums, though. It's hard to get past the fact that you mentioned "Russian Autumn Heart", though. I think if a random stranger were to come up to me in the street and say those words, I'd probably faint. That song is a killer. And I want to hear it RIGHT NOW.

I've still got my Russian Autumn Heart CD single!

Never heard Mimesis. Is it still available?

I daresay so. Go to the myspace page for a taste.

I just found "A Quick Smoke At Spot's" under a pile of CD's, that delicious collection of Church b-sides and cursed myself cause I've been meaning to play it for weeks, and so I finally have. Only to recall that a lyric for "Texas Moon" is "Going down/beneath the Texas Moon". Does it get any better than that? I think not.

I used to own that. Which song was the early version of "Milky Way"?

Truth be told, though some of my fave b-sides of them were "The View" & "As You Will" both from the Heyday era, and alas, these are not included on this compilation.

xpost

Not sure, Fever.

those two tracks are both on the hindsight comp and the heyday reissue

and they were both deserving of a better fate than being a b-side

Oh I just found it now, the one that is some bastardized version of Milky Way, it's called "Anna Miranda". Wow.