| Sunday, August 14th 2011 - 10:22:16 AM | |
| Name: | LittleSatan |
| Review or Comment: | Gold Afternoon Fix is one of the most underrated and overlooked albums of all-time. Beautiful yet haunting, foot-stomping yet depressing. Great story-telling with brilliant music, this has it all to be everyone's best of all time. Note: Grind is perfection. |
| Saturday, July 2nd 2011 - 08:41:22 AM | |
| Name: | actiondan |
| Review or Comment: | Hard to imagine but at one brief point in the late 80s the Church were flirting with the bigtime after the success of Starfish...at times darker and grander than its predecessor...and void of any potential hit single outside of Metropolis...Gold went bust...and the fairly lukewarm reviews and Joshua Tree like cover didn't help...but on reflection...Gold is stronger than most people give it credit...just too cynical for the mainstream breakthrough Starfish created... |
| Wednesday, September 22nd 2010 - 12:41:01 PM | |
| Name: | fip |
| Review Source: | SPIN, May 1990 (p. 81) |
| Review or Comment: | Underground bands tend to hit it big only upon slickening their sound. But when Australian cult faves The Church lushed up an already grandiose mix with strings and horns for 1985's Heyday, all they received was a pink slip from Warner Bros. Instead, the band achieved pop success two years later with "Under The Milky Way," an unadorned ballad that singer/bassist Steve Kilbey fashioned after a Sinatra tune from his boyhood days.
The folks at Arista should thus be pleased that the band's latest, Gold Afternoon Fix, continues in a more down-to-earth vein. Guitars prevail, the psychedelic affectations of earlier records are barely apparent (save in the LP title), and LA session vet Waddy Wachtel once more provides smooth production without commercial overkill. For the listener, however, results remain mixed. Clearly, having dropped the 60s angle, The Church are still searching for an identity that fits. They could learn from the relative restraint of their smash; the best tracks on Gold Afternoon Fix mine the same subtle terrain as "Milky Way," with Kilbey reining in his more extravagant lyrical impulses and the band following suit with spare arrangements and languid tempos. Sure, it's the kind of stuff that can fade to nothingness on your home stereo, but on a Walkman, it becomes the perfect soundtrack to your sad little existence. "Disappointment," the record's loveliest track, smartly borrows "Milky Way"'s vaguely Latin rhythms and vocal intimacy, but goes even further, gently suggesting the cloudiness of regret, an emotional inertia born of romantic devastation. The same appealing moodiness pervades "City," "Laughing" and "Monday Morning," but it's offset by a few strident attempts at decadent dance-pop. The better tracks on their last record had an undercurrent of sinuous menace that gave them a needed charge, but here Kilbey goes overboard into crass, sub-Bowie obnoxiousness. He simply doesn't have the sexual charisma to carry off intentional trash like the space opera scenarios of "Terra Nova Cain" and "Metropolis," which offer colorful intergalactic scenery as an excuse for the takeoff of Kilbey's libido. A few more irresistible melodies might've saved Gold Afternoon Fix from its own goofiness. As subsequent tracks bear out, however, Kilbey's too busy trying to link his sci-fi visions to a major statement on time itself. He could learn something from guitarist Peter Koppes' "Transient," as the record's most dynamic rocker and as its definitive statement on the temporal meaning of rock'n'roll: "Here for now." -Jen Fleischer |
| Monday, December 5th 2005 - 08:39:44 PM | |
| Name: | fip |
| Review Source: | Unknown (clipping) |
| Review or Comment: | THE CHURCH
'Gold Afternoon Fix' (Arista LP/Cassette/CD) Maybe it's something to do with the weather. Five years ago, at the time of their shamefully neglected 'Heyday' LP, Australia's The Church appeared to be suffering from big-blue-sky-dreamers syndrome. 'Heyday' was a delightful album, but its paisley gauze of guitar textures and infolded melodies was too conspicuously a filtering of laidback (Californian) Byrds-iness. Well it could be the Greenhouse Effect unsettling Antipodean weather patterns, or it could be that the band took time off for solo ventures after the transitional 'Starfish' LP, but 'Gold Afternoon Fix' is certainly a shadier, more sultry affair. They are still dealing primarily in fluid, impressionistic guitar figures, but the songs are more direct, and a rockier edge has crept in. Main vocalist/lyricist Steve Kilbey is quite the little Lou Reed at times, and nothing so blunt as the "Your little bunch of followers turned you into a fool/The butt of all their vicious jokes" lyric to 'You're Still Beautiful' would have made it into earlier cloud-free abstractions. Maybe they found out that too much sun gives you skin cancer. 'Terra Nova Cain' is sexily sinister, 'Metropolis is addictively poppy in a 'Hey! Wind the windows down and let's cruise!' sort of a way, and the searing burst of 'Essence' is pushy enough to give Guy Chadwick a few extra worry lines. Some of the ideas are less than successful (the dreary strum 'Disappointment' is just that) but there are enough good ones for this to sound more like an accomplished debut, than something released ten years into their career. (7) - Roger Morton |
| Sunday, March 13th 2005 - 12:29:39 PM | |
| Name: | Richie |
| Review or Comment: | The most bashed album in the band's catalog. And unfairly judged in my opinion.
"Gold Afternoon Fix" may show the band's frustration at times with an awful situation in the studio, but the band is still firing on all thrusters here. "Pharoah," opens the album ala destination from the previous "Starfish" as a sonic nightmare brought to fruition. The song to me SCREAMS to be made into a visual masterpiece, but that is not what the boys are about so settling for the just under 4 minutes of a romp through hell and back will have to suffice. "Metropolis" is the song that cemented The Church in my musical vocabulary. I actually like it better than "Under the Milky Way," in terms of the band's commercial appeal and was introduced to it on college radio, while I was actually in COLLEGE so I consider it a baptism to the band of sorts. Pure brilliance. "Terra Nova Cain," is Steve playing around again with his imagery to grand effect. "City," is pure pop heaven, soft and melodious as is "Monday Morning," one of my favorite Church tunes for it's simplicity, yet it is intricate and engrossing at the same time, something quite a few bands can manage to pull off. "Essence" is another pop gem and has hooks to spare. "You're Still Beautiful" may be a strange offering, but it is a fun track to behold. "Russian Autumn Heart" finds Marty having fun while "Disappointment" is Steve harkening back to his melancholy best as he does later with "Grind," the standout closing track. "Fading Away" is one of my favorite tracks with it's mantra-like chorus. While arguably not their most appealing album, one that should simply not have been discarded to the cheap bins either. "Starfish" was a tough act to follow, and I think the boys deserve a listen or several dozen for that matter for producing a consistently listenable piece of work like "Gold Afternoon Fix." |
