What is your favorite song on Gold Afternoon Fix by The Church

Mostly I just want to talk about this album and I saw there was no poll.

I think I have to choose Metropolis because it was my original favorite and it never disappoints. I love the lyrics/imagery, the guitars, the dynamic structure, the whole thing. "Don't say the damage is worse than it is" <3

Also I tried to search for other Church threads, but only found the one I posted this to. Is there something wrong with Church search?

This poll brought to you by this experience:

similar story! I have been waiting for a copy of Gold Afternoon Fix to cross my path for years since I had the shitty Columbia House cassette back when it came out and never replaced it. On Saturday I was at a friend's single release show/in store and I didn't really look around the store at all bc I was socializing. There was also a VU cover act playing and I was standing by the bargain CD bin and was browsing when I remembered to look in the Cs, as I always do. There it was!

So I finally listened to the whole album after all this time and guess what -- there are some boring songs but overall, I still really like it! Surprise favorites because I had forgotten about them completely and always liked them back when: Fading Away and Grind (the guitar parts on this are so good!!)

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Monday, December 16, 2019 10:21 AM

'Metropolis' is an easy choice for me - really lovely melody that stands up better than the rest of the record. Still have this on cassette, but it rarely gets a listen, as there are much better Church records in my opinion. I did add 'Forgotten Reign' to my 'Deep In The Shallows' digital collection, as it is a very nice bonus track from the 2 disc version of the record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ-rvADtSjQ

There are better Church records for sure. When this album came out, it sounded flabby and bloated to me. But the highlights have endured imo!

One of those times when the hit is the best single.

Yeah it really does stand out. But the rest of the album isn't BAD -- it's just that no one cares because it's not the best Church and it's not Metropolis.

"Metropolis" over "Russian Autumn Heart", which also gets stuck in my head at times.

My view of post-"Starfish" albums is that they're all a mixed bag but there's always 4-6 tracks that are ABSOLUTELY STELLAR. I listened my 5 hour compilation of those on a recent drive up to Maine and it made the time just whizz by, so propulsive and immersive is The Church.

I've always meant to look into Kilbey's solo works but there's just so much of it...

I'll rep for both Monday Morning for the delivery of the line "dice rolled, double six double six double six" and Transient, which glides right along in the best Church fashion and is the best Peter Koppes vocal in the Church oeuvre (what is he doing with the rhyming vowels in the chorus of this song? it's inexplicable) and also has a southern hemisphere seasonal reference about the leaves falling in May which always delights me.

This album has hidden depths!

I agree!! Transient is quite good — I like the urgent feel & always noticed the “leaves in May” as well 😀

“Monday Morning” also has another of my personal fave sing songy Kilbey melodies + “take me back, leave me here” which I always liked for some reason.

This album: not as bad as it looks!! (It looks pretty dire imo, and my GAF T-shirt had a very bad rubbery smell)

I listened my 5 hour compilation of those on a recent drive up to Maine and it made the time just whizz by, so propulsive and immersive is The Church.

People who know how to live, hi 5

I think “You’re Still Beautiful” resonates lyrically and musically. I like the stomp + loling @ vanity

At least its artistic, I guess

I guess?

listening to Myrrh driving on the highway is always a fantastic experience. GAF's driving song has to be Transient I think, or maybe Essence

I think my least fave songs on this album are Laughing and Terra Nova Cain. Both are boring and could have been cut. And I’m a Marty partisan!

Laughing is a CD-only bonus track, so it kind of was cut! As was Monday Morning, cry cry cry

On that note, this album does *feel* like it's one of those CD-maxing 74 minute releases, but even with the two bonus tracks it's still only 57 minutes long!

Kind of a tangent, but I realized recently that Starfish is the oldest CD purchase I still own, meaning I've owned that CD for 32 years or thereabouts. I bought other CDs before Starfish, but they all wound up in various used bins. So, congrats to The Church, and to Starfish!

Back on topic, voting "Metropolis." With most everybody else, I assume.

To me this album has always sounded like a deeply unhappy band trapped in a gilded studio cage to make another Starfish. I know Kilbey gave the opiates a pretty hefty nudge and of course it was the end of the road for Ploog. There are good moments of course - I always liked “Disappointed” as well as many that have been mentioned - but the whole thing is so sterile and unmotivated. Came roaring back with P=A of course.

voting 'russian autumn heart' because it roolz.

Sterile & unmotivated
Vs
Flabby & bloated

Either way this album doesn’t scream urgency that’s for sure. I didn’t know Kilbey was into opiates? :(

From MWP's web site, a great exegesis of the recording of Gold Afternoon Fix:

https://martywillson-piper.com/gold-afternoon-fix/

Oooh! Big sigh for Marty & his website. I literally made a face, recoiled, and stopped reading when he said Don Henley was a great drummer. Wtf.

hahaha, read on! his thesis statement is that GAF's major flaw was not using a real drummer

ok that's good. i have come to terms with him periodically having bad taste! :)

Yeah, I think the flab comes from not having good ideas to get excited about and just drifting along with the mediocre ones because they had to produce something. And yeah Kilbey’s interest in opiates was intense and lingered for many years. Priest=Aura was probably his most serious phase of addiction, he has written a fair bit about it, but it was many years before he cleaned up.

ah - took a bit of finding: http://thetimebeing.com/bishop-handjob/

Woooooow
Priest = Aura
or
Bishop = Handjob

😢😢😢

This was the first Church record I fully absorbed at the time of release. (I'd come to know most of Starfish I guess, but I was still fairly young then.) My relative lack of Church baggage may account for me liking it a lot at the time. Now it's just firmly embedded in my brain as What Certain Months In 1990 Sounded Like (along with other imperfect guitar-y records by House of Love, Concrete Blonde, The Chills and Someloves that I have similarly little hope of assessing objectively.)

I will seemingly always like the sequence of "City" + "Monday Morning" + "Russian Autumn Heart". (Amazed that MWP is quite that dismissive.) And "Fading Away". I liked "Disappointment" and "Grind" but they really could be more concise. I think "You're Still Beautiful" was my preferred single as a kid! Not so much today, though it's okay.

Destroy: "Terra Nova Cain" -- the futuristic lyrics and dinky production flourishes are not working for me today. I think "Transient" was one I used to skip all along. Can certainly understand why.

I'll have to contemplate this further...

I remember spending time just looking at the album cover and thinking about the cryptic song titles, there was an M.C. Escher sorta quality to the photos... in 1990 I didn't really like the music that much at the time! I got my copy for like a dollar or two at Half Price Books so even finding a couple songs I liked on it would have been enough for me to consider it money well-spent.

You all have got me ready to listen to this one again. It's been 20+ years since the last time. It was the memory of "Monday Morning" that did it. I'll report back!

Located a Kilbey blog entry about GAF (by searching for "gaffe" on his blog site):

http://thetimebeing.com/why-killer-thinks-things-are-good-n-bad/

So official takes on what Gold Afternoon Fix is missing:
Kilbey: Love
Willson-Piper: Real Drummer

5 hour what the what now????

Voted Pharaoh, difficult choice, love the dinky guitars as keyboard tho.

The record cover photos are so ridiculously brilliant and over the top.

Also, are we doing P=A next?

i think the third concert i ever saw was the GAF tour in Sydney... first post-Ploog tour Jay-Dee Daugherty on drums. i was an undiscriminating punter but it felt good, about half new LP stuff and a really good selection of earlier material (particularly remember You Took, Don't Look Back, Tantalized). in retrospect it was a surprisingly small venue given how big Starfish was, the Enmore Theatre holds about 2000? they played two nights, but still.

listening to the album now i'm surprised by how enjoyable it is - probably less urgency than Starfish but full of nice melodies and detail, and well-recorded chiming guitars. Metropolis clearly the best song, a single that i found pretty anodyne on release, probably on account of wanting the Church to be more of a goth band than they actually were.

Kilbey's ability to sell his ridiculous lyrics via his deadpan delivery is superb.

ridiculous lyrics

hold up now

heh

well

look

i mean

Turn down the gravity, this is all too heavy
I'll show you how the ancients once traveled
They used to call this a Chevy
Just before the continents sank, you could still go outside
I was sitting on a hot off ramp
She pulled up and asked me if I needed a ride

Terra nova cain I need you again
Deep space jam on an alien terrain
Terra nova cain I need you again
Some for the little boys who live down the lane

I should have known there was something amiss
She had unearthly eyes
She had a way of sifting through your mind
Like she'd done it to a million guys
She said will you help with our research
I said take me to your leader
She put her foot down on the oscillation pedal
She was a transdimensional speeder

Terra nova cain I need you again
Protect me from the meteor rain
Terra nova cain I need you again
Put your exploratory probe right into my brain

While I concur that GAF doesn't reach the highs of their very finest work, I still unreservedly love it. The songs offer a great deal of the particular mix of elements that I most want from the Church - the fog of dreamy melancholy, the precise, silvery flares of chiming guitar. My vote here went to 'Fading Away', which would probably make it into my Church all-time top ten.
I'm not nearly as bothered by the drum machine as MWP - perhaps because my musical tastes were formed during the 1980s. The funny thing is that I've always thought that Richard Ploog played like a machine anyway - in the studio, he had great timekeeping and not a lot of 'feel'.

Yeah - Seance in particular sounds like a drum machine because of what I presume is a triggered snare sound - it weirdly quantises all the rolls (cf. "Electric Lash"). But that album is brilliant because of its fuggy woozy insular sound, a sort of tranq'd out garage rock feel. GAF is horribly clean and perfectionist, those hyperreal airbrushed photos on the cover contrasting with the smudgy portraits on Starfish and the goth drag of Seance. At the same time Kilbey was creating lo-fi masterpieces like Unearthed and Remindlessness at home in Rozelle - it's easy to see why LA studio sessions would feel like a 9 to 5 job with the inspiration level dialled back accordingly.

Wait — Kilbey was doing Earthed/unearthed at the same time as GAF?? That explains a lot! I truly love at least a couple songs from Unearthed!!

Judgement Day is still my jam!! Speaking of drum machines...

Sorry - misleading there - Unearthed was contemporaneous to Starfish and Remindlessness was in the GAF period. Unearthed is one of my most loved records of all time actually.

Totally underrated, agree. But I’m with Marty — a real drummer would have made it (and tbh GAF) much better.

Just remember I saw this tour in NY!

Relistening now -- much better with age (its? my?). Guitars sound great. "Monday Morning" was gorgeous. Still not a
big fan of MWP's strained vocal delivery.

"Essence" just came on. Beautiful gtr interplay...

"Remindlessness" rules!

*remembered

Admirable how Kilbey continued mining this comic book mystico Borgesian lyrical vein into "P=A", but stripped down, slower - I'm sure the opiates helped this along - and made that album into a better, almost shadow image of GFA.

Not sure how Somewhere Anywhere fits into the scheme, though. Haven't listened to that one in ages.

"You're Still Beautiful" : nah. Always annoyed me.
"Disappointment" : gorgeous.

I meant "Sometime Anywhere".

Man, the bass tone and playing in "Disappointment" really makes that song.

6/10 album. Voted "Disappointment".

Sometime Anywhere is all over the place (and I think their longest release to date? 76 minutes, not even counting the bonus disc with seven more tracks) and some the lyrics are ugh-it's a divorce album-but it has one of the strongest finishes of any album... Two Places at Once, Business Woman, Authority, Fly Home, and the Dead Man's Dream. Kilbey is on record as hating Business Woman, it is the Metropolis of Sometime Anywhere, Church-by-numbers but the formula works its magic, the guitars are beautiful.

Admirable how Kilbey continued mining this comic book mystico Borgesian lyrical vein into "P=A"

He never stopped doing this, really... he's like the Stephen King of alt rock

5 hour what the what now????

I cherry picked everything they've done starting with GAF and it's a wonderful anthology of their later work, it all flows remarkably well despite the personnel and stylistic changes.

My picks for GAF are: "Metropolis", "Terra Nova Cain" (I'm a sucker for the comic book dystopian future vibe), "Monday Morning", "Russian Autumn Heart" and "You're Still Beautiful".
For P=A I went with: "Aura", "Ripple", "Lustre", "Feel" and "The Disillusionist".
For SA I went with: "Day Of The Dead", "Two Places At Once", "Business Woman", "Authority" and "Fly Home". (basically the same as Hazel).

heh, I'd also like to see the full five-hour playlist!

Ok, here's the rest:
Magician: "Welcome", "Comedown", "Ladyboy", "It Could Be Anyone", "Magician Among The Spirits"
Hologram: "Ricochet", "Louisiana", "No Certainty Attached", "Tranquility", "Another Earth"
Box of Birds: "Decadance" (a favorite from Kevin Ayers)
After Everything: "Numbers", "The Awful Ache", "Chromium", "Radiance", "Night Friends"
Forget Yourself: "Sealine", "Song In Space", "Telepath", "Lay Low", "Appalatia"
El Momento Descuidado: "0408", "Invisible (acoustic)"
Uninvited: "Block", "Unified Field", "Easy", "Day 5"
El Momento Siguiente: "Song In The Afternoon"
Pangea EP: "So Love May Find Us" (yes, all 18 minutes of it!)
Untitled 23: "Deadman's Hand", "Anchorage"
Further Deeper: "Vanishing Man", "Delirious", "Laurel Canyon", "Globe Spinning", "Miami", "The Girl Is Buoyant" - the latter is a bonus track on some versions
Man Woman: "Another Century", "Undersea", "Before The Deluge", "A Face In Film", "Dark Waltz"

So you can see I tried to limit myself to 5 picks per album, which was hard in some cases. And I really didn't like "Untitled #23", though I know lots of folks here loved it. Their last couple of albums have been incredibly strong. I didn't dig into some of the self-released stuff like "Beast With Two Backs" or their b-sides, if I've missed something great, let me know!

Okay, so I made this on Spotify, sadly 'The Girl Is Buoyant' is missing, everything else is there though.

https://open.spotify.com/user/mzui/playlist/0GbACfqkXEzYAQNzD4wX7b

It is in chronological order as you laid out above Gerald.

It's pre-GAF yes, but Texas Moon has always been my most favourite Church B-Side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tiJtZvzApA

not mine!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL2l2hylQLU

Cheers, Maresnest!

Hey this thread bore fruit! That’s great. Thank you!!

I'm a sucker for a bit of curatorship, I still listen to certain compilations made by ppl on here, Motorspycho and Stereolab for instance, it's one of the great benefits of ILM.

Agreed! That thread where people post their homemade Best-Of's is one of my favorites.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I have not heard this album in a very long time. Will have to read this and put it on

Just did a quick re-listen, which confirmed my initial pick of 'Fading Away'.
Metropolis and Monday Morning are both lovely. There are better versions of Russian Autumn Heart on Heyday.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Wow, surprise at #2! I feel bad for 0 vote Monday Morning! I’ll admit that I like the lullaby feel and always felt the sentiment of the lyrics, “take me back, leave me here” for some reason. Who hasn’t felt that? Still the right song won and I’ve come around to agreeing w Marty that the drums on this album are flabby and the sequencing is bad.

Metropolis is terrible, it sounds like they were rounded up and held captive until they did a complete take.

Surprisingly strong lead over everything else. I guess I either forgot to actually vote for "Monday Morning" or went with "Russian Autumn Heart" instead. (It's a while ago now. Wuhan doctors had only just noticed an inexplicable uptick in pneumonia cases when this was started...)