| Sunday, January 1st 2012 - 07:55:00 PM | |
| Name: | fip |
| Review Source: | NME [UK] - unknown date |
| Review or Comment: | This is persuasive, intelligent work - a guitar band able to turn riffs and phrases over and over like pieces of rough crystal, until a shining song has been polished out of it. Now they just need something to write about.
This central void, already evident on the many earlier Church LPs and singles, is the dilemma all these prismatic bangle-jangle bands are facing and which only The Smiths have so far resolved. As prettily as these tunes chime, there's nothing but marshmallow underneath. On the one moment where The Church soil their hands a bit - wth the rinky-dink beat of 'Maybe These Boys' - they get clumsy and embarrassed. Sometimes it's good enough to keep, like 'Constant In Opal' and 'Shadow Cabinet', where themes are embellished with sufficient ingenuity to make it stick. But when you're reduced to noting physical weaknesses (too-pallid singing, too-smooth rhythms) and nothing else, the faceless cut of it all is inescapable. The strings are singing a fragile tune. Richard Cook |
| Sunday, January 1st 2012 - 07:36:30 PM | |
| Name: | fip |
| Review Source: | Rolling Stone - October 25,1984 |
| Review or Comment: | Rating: *** (3 stars)
by Debby Miller In "Into My Hands", the most beautiful of the songs on this album by the Australian band the Church, singer Steve Kilbey, in his spacey fashion, pronounces an extraordinary bit of poetry: "As it gets so uncertain/When the girl gets too near/It's never as good as I hoped/Or as bad as I feared." This is more clever and more down to earth, than Kilbey usually is. His verses more often bring to mind early King Crimson or Pink Floyd, and most of what he says will whiz by the average guy, like these lines from "Shadow Cabinet": "Junction fever must have closed down the rail/ The gluttonous wind keeps on nibbling the sail/Queuing in the ruins in the wake of the gale/It's harmony I say." Still, Kilbey comes up with some fascinating images: "I journey back to winterland/Cut my losses,grow my hair" he sings in one song. The music, primarily a mix of acoustic guitars and synthesizers, sets a consistently dark ambiance. The wistful but grand instrumental track, "Remote Luxury", is like a wonderful piece of soundtrack music: evocative and richly textured. There's a sadness, a threat or a longing at the heart of most of the songs though the feeling is mostly conveyed by Kilbey's drifty, droning voice. With it's jangling guitars, the band often sounds very pretty, which is good because Kilbey doesn't. When the poetry is too trippy, as in "Maybe These Boys", it's hard to take the wimpy artiness of the album. But when Kilbey makes charming wordplays, as he does in the gorgeous "No Explanation", there's a ray of hope that this band, which has released three earlier LP's, could be more than just a psychedelic cult act. |
| Sunday, January 1st 2012 - 07:20:06 PM | |
| Name: | fip |
| Review Source: | Unknown source (clipping) |
| Review or Comment: | England has The Smiths, America has REM and Australia has The Church, whose credence may not be fashionable, but it's certainly admirable. Having promoted a charismatic jingle jangle guitar sound on their first three excellent albums, 'Remote Luxury finds The Church heading off in a divergent area.
The guitars are still intact, but the approach melanged with the subject matter find song-smith Steve Kilby [sic] traipsing through the tunnel of tranquility. Apart from the opening track 'Constant In Opal' with it's feedback guitar intro and tape-loop type bass playing, the majority of side one is disappointingly mellow. Moreover, 'No Explanation' Has an enchanting summery feel to it with the phrasing being not too far removed from that of a certain '60s protest singer. Whereas 'Ten Thousand Miles' is the sort of music Jimi Hendrix used to lean against and crank up during the psychedelic era. Side two without as doubt delivers the goods. 'A Month Of Sundays' picks up the scorned sighs of boredom that were to be found on the previous side and should be a single. It should also be played time and time again and filed under excitement. With a title like that, I've decided that it would make a great stage play. Glenda Jackson couldn't possibly refuse! 'Volumes', the best track on the album reminds me of early U2, which just goes to show that The Church still 'mean it', even on an album of heavily, hazy, phased production. This album certainly is remote in it's luxury. let's hope the next one isn't. |
| Friday, December 15th 2006 - 03:45:40 AM | |
| Name: | fip |
| Review Source: | CREEM [USA] - March 1985 |
| Review or Comment: | The Church
"Remote Luxury" (Warner Bros.) by Robert Christgau I see these Aussies as the wimp Del Fuegos--musically they wind up just where they want and epistemologically they go next to nowhere. All right, so the songs are quite pretty in a modernized early-Faces/late-Zombies kind of way--more consistently so than the '60s competition (which gives them a leg up on the Fuegos, who like the macho boys they are take on the Stones). I even get the point: the sweet, melancholy alienation the band cultivates is an attractive alternative to the crass pragmatism and/or self-righteous nihilism of their contemporaries. But where my own fave formalists the Shoes are honest enough to focus their lyrics on the very limited social milieu essential to the nurture of such alternatives, these guys evade specifics via metaphor and have the presumption to reproduce their hazy poetry on the inner sleeve. Which may help explain why the music sometimes almost drifts away. B |
| Saturday, March 11th 2006 - 03:11:37 PM | |
| Name: | wes |
| Review or Comment: | Whoever wrote the thing that precedes this is a fool. The Church on Remote Luxury sound nothing at all like the Byrds. The only thing the Church have in common with the Byrds is that among their contemporaries, they're the coolest of the cool. In other words, tho' they be not the best songwriters, per se, their sound and their aura and simply the most cutting, heavy, and haunted/ing.
And to mention REM in the same breath as Kilbey's group is grotesque. They couldn't conjure one tenth of the ghosts in the Church's machine. We heard Constant In Opal on the radio in '84 and freaked out. The record has only gotten heavier with every year that has passed since then. It's far and away the best Church record (yeah, I know it wasn't a record of theirs in the usual sense, etc.). It's their peak, their only great album, and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't get what these guys are really all about. Take your Heydays and your Starfishes and stick 'em where the sun don't shine. It's mush, it's crap; most of what these guys have done is mediocre beyond hope of redemption, but this record shines like the morning star. For its true sequel, look not to what they did in the 80's or 90's (even though Priest=Aura started back toward the path), but to these tracks on After Everything...: After Everything, Radiance, and Night Friends. In some very lucid moments, Kilbey got back to where he once belonged. The chorus of Radiance is an equivalent to the chorus of Violet Town, and Night Friends is an entirely new place, tho' hearkening back, in its chorus, to the bizarre qualities of Sisters. Anyway, you've heard the truth now, Good luck. |
| Monday, December 5th 2005 - 05:47:32 PM | |
| Name: | fip |
| Review Source: | Unknown (clipping) |
| Review or Comment: | Still ploughing a fairly Byrds-like groove in breezy pop, "Remote Luxury" breezes along with its McGuinnalike guitars and clean, uncluttered production. There's nothing particularly innovative about it (and nothing even threatening to rival '82's "Sing Songs" EP), but the band's remarkably durable naivety and a solid lack of pretention are a refreshing antidote to the increasingly frustrating excesses of their nearest contemporary equivalents, REM.
The Church remain jauntily self-effacing, and while the strain begins to show on "Into My Hands" (which rides just a little too close to "Chestnut Mare" for comfort) for the most part it's hard not to imagine the whole ensemble cracking up and launching into a debauched vaudevillian recital of "Mr Spaceman", the Byrds song which is closest in spirit to The Church's ethereal janglings. The map references might be etched deeply into these grooves, but The Church still manage to avoid sounding dated. It's a trait they seen to share with most of their fellow Antipodeans; The Church could be as anachronistic as they wanted, but the scars of living 20,000 miles from the nearest point of western civilisation would still show through. And it's good - where else could you hear the Flying Burrito Brothers rewriting one of those lovely little singles Pink Floyd used to make after Syd Barrett quit and still sounding as if they were making a valid contemporary statement? That song is "Volumes" and, as an indication of the wealth of wonderment included in this record, it speaks for itself. -Dave Thomas |
| Monday, December 5th 2005 - 01:57:26 AM | |
| Name: | fip |
| Review Source: | SOUNDS [UK] - 1984 |
| Review or Comment: | THE CHURCH
'Remote Luxury' (Carrere CAL 213) *** 1/2 (3.5 stars) Maybe it's the Anglo origins of Churchmen Steve Kilbey and Marty Willson-Piper, but the path this Australian quartet beat to the door of American rock 'n'roll is neither as straight nor as narrow as popularly plotted in the past. Of course, the touchstones are present and correct; the plangent melody of a song like 'No Explanation' (one REM would be proud to have written), the Byrdsian click of 'Into My Hands' or the more current if less alluring moodiness of 'Constant In Opal'. But Kilbey's lightly drawn, brightly figured songs don't thrive on a checklist of stock-in-trade r'n'r imagery. Thus 'Remote Luxury' conjures up, variously, a host of Sixties mind-expanders, the plod and plunder of the Psychedelic Furs and even the likes of Vangelis and Mike Oldfield! To first time Church-goers, it might seen an unholy mess, but shorn of the brutal beat that kept 1983's 'Seance' from taking off, 'Remote Luxury' navigates between its stylistic stools with a confidence borne of experience. -Bill Black |
| Saturday, July 3rd 2004 - 03:20:24 PM | |
| Name: | Carlos |
| Review or Comment: | Well, it's difficult for me to express in words when the feeling is too strong. It's commonplace to say that this album is a masterpiece. I got to know it maybe in 1993 and I still love these songs. They can cure me in moments of despair... I adore THE CHURCH! |
