The Church - The Blurred Crusade POLL

I normally come back to this album because I'm thinking about "to be in your eyes" so it's gotta be that. I'm a real sucker for Imaj7-IVmaj7, it's shameful

I bumped Heyday when doing these New Wave polls for Talking Heads. Did that because TH was more New Wave then that album.

I voted "When You Were Mine" but should relisten.

To Be In Your Eyes is definitely The One but this album is front to back CLASSIC

the only moment that gives me the slightest misgivings is the “rock attack” guitar bit at the beginning of A Fire Burns (song settles down nicely after that)

My god, what a choice. I’m not sure The Church put together an album this consistently brilliant again until maybe Priest=Aura. Oh wait, I forgot Seance.
“Almost With You” ties “Cattle and Cane” for my favourite Aus single of the 80s, but in this case I have to pick “Just For You”, goofy intro and all, in case it doesn’t otherwise place.
But it’s front-to-back glory, really. Thanks for making me put it on.

I’m not sure The Church put together an album this consistently brilliant again until

but also Heyday!!!!! that one is a total ripper

thing about Blurred Crusade that i have probably gone on about elsewhere - but who was doing stuff like this in 1982? it looked back (yes) but also really anticipated a lot of sounds and styles from later in the decade and the early 90s even

yep, gonna be the guy to vote for the long jammy one. love a good jangle vamp, and also when the title track isn't.

not to divert attention away from this album, but i find a lot of similar musical dna in the first wire train album. definitely riyl.

Wow even just seeing the names of these tracks ignites a cascade of neurons and a feast of jangle in my head. Some of these lyrics are absolutely burned in my brain

They’re going to send you away she said
And psychic angels spread on the top of her head
And in the compartments of our dread
The rush hour crush travels home
To bed

Honestly 'jangle' does not even do justice to the luxuriance of the guitar tones going on on this album

It's not just jangling. On You Took alone, there're chiming, ringing like a bell, sparkling and corruscating sheets of reverbed distortion! I want to know what chorus they were using on this album because it's so rich and shimmering without having that overmodulated 80s sound?

Amazing, I can tell you. Ibanez UE-405 which was a rack mount multi-effect. I had one but it wasn’t something I knew how to use well, ended up selling it to a guy who maintained a cache of touring gear which he occasionally lent to the Church. I can’t say for certain it was on this album but they definitely used them.

*amazingly

Yep, right from the start, both Koppes and MWP used the UE-405. I'd say its compressor was equally important to their sound.

Also, smh at the implication above that Starfish isn't utterly brilliant too.

Thank you! That's something I've been wondering about for years. Their guitar tones were just always absolutely immaculate.

Had to go for 'When You Were Mine'

(Wouldn't it have been just perfect for the cast of The Breakfast Club to have done their dance routines to?)

The descending guitars after that long luxurious intro, lovely floaty keyboard choir drone that builds so well at the end, the Spanish sounding middle eight bit, the way it modulates away for just the brilliant guitar solo, gawd so much goodness in one pop tune.

Yeah there's something about that 'aaaaah' choir keyboard sound that sends me on infinite regressions of teenaged happiness

It's strange how they used so many sounds and tonalities that would become complete cliches through the 80s. But everything is just so beautifully executed and arranged and produced that it sounds fresh!

There's this strange double consciousness with this music. Do I love it so much because I've known it so long, and it's woven through so much of my youth? But as I listen to it with adult ears and more understanding of music and songwriting and production, I can't help but think. No, this is so skilfully done

Some of the lyrics feel a little overblown now. But we laughed at the pompousness of things like Field Of Mars at the time, too. I still enjoy the acid-fried surrealism

I don’t think MWP has ever written a lyric I didn’t want to laugh at. “Volumes have secrets - take them on holiday - to read and to learn, they’re heavy to carry, and easy to burrrrn”

Tough crowd! MWP is no SK, it's true, but I generally enjoy his lyrics. "Russian Autumn Heart" I like a lot, actually. "A trillion pennies for a handful of dust" is one way to look at the space race.

i love mwp, but i'm just gonna put this out there: if yer listening to him for lyrics, yr doin it wrong.

also i have to say the love this band gets shown here warms my heart. in my musical rearing, and getting into them in retrospect, they were pretty handily and harshly judged as SECOND TIER by my misguided mentors. they are one of the best dance bands of the 80s, aren't they?🙂

very cool info re:guitar tones and effects! like with a lot of 80s altrock bands, i just assumed they were relying on boss stompboxes. figures they would be more into fancy rack gear.

thanks for the poll, h.p., you may have kicked off an early church marathon for the weekend!

Also, smh at the implication above that _Starfish_ isn't utterly brilliant too.

Shall we do a 'Starfish but you can't vote for Under The Milky Way' poll?

(Or would Reptile just walk it instead)

yes.

(and no, "reptile" wouldn't be my vote, but y'know)

I'm listening for the first time in ages, but my memory was that my fave was Hotel Womb? I tend to love the long psychedelic freakout side / album closers because honestly that's what The Church do best. And what's great about The Blurred Crusade is that you get two of them, both with short, bittersweet semi-coda songs afterwards

I'll do one when this poll has finished so as not to take over the whole of New Answers with my love of Church Guitar Tone

I came to them through Karl Ove Kanusgård, and so have been thinking they were, like, underground-hip! The song he wrote about in that chapter was awesome. I'll try to find time for a full listen so I can cast a "total newcomer" vote

It's really interesting to me to see if there's a difference between 'total newcomer' votes versus folks who have 30+ year histories with an album

This thread revive has made me dig out my old copy of 'A Quick Smoke At Spots' this afternoon, which I think is a comp from the Starfish era, unused tracks, and it's totally great.

Texas Moon especially, one chord, starts off like a Joshua Tree B-side and builds up and up on a simple motif, might have been a studio jam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22XO9Xl3VJQ

The Church - Starfish POLL

love that comp, mares! i got into them initially around the turn of the century, so finding a random used copy at amoeba that one time was a goldmine.

this was actually the first version of "almost with you" that i heard, on account of the new material being more freshly distributed in my neck of the woods:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzKKzrTpWjw
"almost with you (acoustic)" (2004)

is that a pan flute synth solo you got there, friend?

(i love the momento acoustic live in studio albums. unconditionally.)

and yeah, "hotel womb" is my starfish pick. will hold back further starfish discussion until the time is right.

That was excellent. Seemed uniformly excellent too, so I'll need to play it a couple more times. Also, fortuitously, Almost With You was the single Church song I knew already.

I think I'll have to go with "Field of Mars", having only today heard it's a reference to a very specific cemetery (maybe the one in Ryde?) rather than simply a cool-sounding Roman thing. It suddenly feels more coherent and affecting as a song about grief.

i grew up near the Field of Mars in Ryde - there is also a nature reserve with that name - I always figured it must’ve been a local reference and always felt a bit buzzed by that

Wow, I’ve been listening to that song for nearly 40 years and had no idea it was a real place! I thought it was something astronomy related TBH

Kilbey seems to confirm the Ryde connection:

I played all the keyboards and all of them were real: real piano, real Hammond, even a real Celeste at the end of ‘Field of Mars’, which I thought would be a good song for Marty to sing. I wrote that song about a graveyard in Sydney called the Field of Mars, which was where my neighbour was buried. His name was Ron Wiseman and he died of emphysema, which must be a terrible way to go. He’d been a good friend to me in the few years I knew him until one night an ambulance took him away and he never came back.

It's quite interesting all round: https://themusic.com.au/news/read-an-excerpt-from-steve-kilbeys-something-quite-peculiar/oCCzsrW0t7Y/31-10-14

I ponied up for the vinyl of the first four, plus bought the Remote Luxury comp on Discogs, so I have been having a great Church revival these past months. They're all good but for me Heyday towers above the rest. Voted "When You Were Mine" for this one.

Saw that they're touring, but unfortunately in theaters with seats... would love to see them in a club like I did a few years ago. Last tour with Koppes and it was fantastic

I went on an early-Church deep dive inspired by that excellent bio chapter (JENNIFER KEYTE? wtf? a national celebrity, and Kilbey was quietly dating her? does not compute). I was surprised to find out that Aus punk / cabaret / alt-pop figure Ignatius Jones' first solo single was written by Kilbey and released in 1982, backed with a weird version of Seance highlight "It's No Reason" which preceded the Church version by a year. I knew "Like a Ghost" from a later Kilbey solo release, but Jones' version is deranged and brilliant, like a direction the Human League could have taken. I love it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxEEBThcsmc

(sorry - the click-through is worth your time)

Wait, what chapter, what Knausgard?

Saw that they're touring, but unfortunately in theaters with seats... would love to see them in a club like I did a few years ago. Last tour with Koppes and it was fantastic

They are playing lots and lots of not-seated clubs on their current US tour for the record, as they have on the four or so tours they’ve already done in the last three years — just in case anyone was put off looking by this post

xpost Somewhere deep in My Struggle (Volume 3 or 4...?), there's a great two or three-page passage about how his older brother Yngve played him Almost With You, and in precisely what way Karl Ove's mind was blown as a result.

XXP: Really didn't see this Ignatius Jones connection coming! Interesting renditions...

Xps thenununu knausgaard music passages,,,, underground-hip? He starts by espousing U2 in book one and finishes with a teary eyed account of a wilco concert in book 6, with every other musical act touched upon existing somewhere between those two acts (not underground, maybe marginally hip). Thanks for the reminder of the church passage though, going to pull it back up and listen along!

Haa!! was not aware! My wife read through the series, I was along for snippets / occasionally whole chapters when we'd read together. He looks so hip in his publicity photos, and he wrote so beautifully about music, and I'd never heard of The Church, so there I went figuring Older Brother Yngve was out on at least the cutting if not bleeding edge of the rock music scene.

Reading my struggle with wife sounds equal parts adorable and painful. Thinking of his book 6 stories of his wife's psychiatric episode in particular. Lots of real, painful marital stress spelled out throughout the volumes. Yngve definitely comes across as knowing his music more than Karl Ove so hey, understandable.

Sorry for derail: authors privilege!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

This would need many more listens to reckon with properly, since all the songs sound good, and I know from past experience how much better Almost With You sounded on fifteenth listen than on second or third.

But since a newbie vote was the whole idea, I went with When You Were Mine. Massive track.

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

Thanks to this thread I now have a nice UK vinyl copy, great to see some love for 'A Quick Smoke...' as well Austin! I do love those Starfish era songs.

Not surprised at the winner, my second pick would have been Field Of Mars for sure.

An article linked on this thread was how I found out that Steve Kilbey is autistic and suddenly a huge chunk of my teenage years makes more sense