By John Andrew Frederick*
If you've a brilliant friend who's pretty clueless when it comes to the social grace of knowing when enough's enough, then you'll fully twig what I mean when I say that this, The Hypnogogue, the so-manyth album by the Church, simply hangs around for too long for it to be considered a rival to the unmitigated masterpieces in their legendary discography. N.B. Those would be, for me at least -- a faithful Church-worshipper/acolyte since I first saw them positively scorch The I-Beam on Haight St. during the Heyday tour -- the following: Priest=Aura, Heyday, The Blurred Crusade, and, yes, Starfish, the record that both made them, as it were, and haunts them (possibly). Convincing arguments could also be made for Forget Yourself and Hologram of Baal, though every Churchie has his or her contenders for such.
It's conceivable that the new album's a victim of the CD-era (which is coming again, mind you, as people these dark days seem to want to have something in hand rather than in a cloud somewhere, thank fuck) wherein the controversial notion of getting [horrid phrase coming] "more bang for your buck" was conceived. Megafans of the band are a-gonna argue that, after a five-year wait for a new offering from this most-prolific group, as many songs as they can get is just fine by them; but I, who long for albums that compel me to press "play" the moment they end, am sorry to say that the shear length of The Hypnogogue has soured me on it. Just a mite, that is. A trifle. It's a really good record, nonetheless, with several absolutely wonderful songs and excellent -- as is this lot's wont -- production all over the shop.
We can start with the title, if you like. It's a perhaps perverse, perhaps cheeky misspelling of a word (yeah, I had to look it up as well) that means, "an agent that induces drowsiness or sleep, a soporific." Now: given the fact that the last LP the band released, Man Woman Life Death Infinity, was, for these ears, the best antidote to insomnia in the Church's catalogue, it might be that Kilbey & Co. were fairly aware of the fact that that record was plagued by way way way too many midtempo sludge-alongs. I mean, I almost (sacre bleu!) traded the thing in I hated it so much. Hating a Church record! Inconceivable! I'm a guy who'll make impassioned apologies for much of the much-maligned Sometime/Anywhere, for Hades's sake!
What is an album, by the bye? Is it merely what a band or solo artist maintains it is? Or is it something different, something sacred, storied, worth revering? To bowdlerize Simon & Garfunkel's "The Dangling Conversation": "Is the album really dead?" [Cue here a discussion amongst yourselves on Art v. Commerce, Singles v. Albums... okay Beatles v. Stones]
The Hypnogogue kicks off with a glowing slowburn, "Acendance", that nicely incorporates what I like to call "sky" guitars (one-note, reverb-drenched soarers that intertwine in the stratosphere, high notes going higher and higher). Dramatic drumless breakdowns here (there are two, for maximum theatrical effect) entice and please in equal measures (pun unfortunate). Next up is the record's centerpiece and, strangely enough, it's not the title track (we'll get to that): "C'est la Vie". This utterly banging banger is dead excellent: the sort of catchy-but-not-too-cloying toe-tapper that we've been waiting for since before Further/Deeper. (For me -- again! -- the idea of Kilbey's quality control/awareness of what his strong songs are was called into question by the fact that he left off the superpoppy masterpiece "The Girl is Bouyant" from that LP.) Easternly flavors are admixed with insistent riffs that, in days of yore, were good old Wilson-Piper's signatures. And here I'll seize the op to naysay any of you out there who go crowing, "No Marty, no Church!" (or "No Peter", now, for that matter). Newish lead-guy Ian Haug's not nearly as flashy as the be-mulleted/be-earring'd one, nor as effortlessly tasteful as the quiet, tall guy one, but surely he more-than gets the axe-job done. "C'est La Vie" is doubtless up there with all the songs you prize by these guys, no question. Definitely a song you'll binge on like an album that's... well, cf. my opening salvo here.
"I Think I Know" presents a delicious melancholic vibe with Kilbey's beautiful raw honey vox up front; and it puts one in mind of whatever Churchsong that made one into a more-than-casual fan of the band. I don't ever know what Steve is on about, lyrically; and somehow I don't want to know. I've always thought -- when a lyric sheet's been provided -- that he wrote superpoetic gobbledegook, the kinda stuff you could get off your refrigerator magnet poetry set and get away with matching melodies to. He's (quite seriously now) the rock answer to a guy like Swinburne or John Ashberry -- poets who don't seem to give a tinker's if there's no meaning to their stuff as long as it sounds mellifluous as a daisy or posy in high midsummer.
"Flickering Lights" ventures into the more quasi-experimental areas of the kind normally reserved for his solo excursions; then it shifts gears and heads for the sort of almost Kubrickian realms the band's never blasted off for, really. (No wonder good old Steve's described this release as "kinda proggy"; it's not really -- believe me, I'm a full-on Yes/Genesis guy -- but there are indeed some Yes/Genesis-y passages here, no kidding, but they're more like flashes of such than Seventies virtuosi flashy.)
Now for the title track: it's a grower indeed, the sort of 6/8 ascendant approach that made so many pulsating, tribalish-beat melodies on Starfish work their mad, merry way into your sub/conscious. "Albert Ross" must needs be the track Kilb's talking about when he refs "mullet rock"; it's the sort of nylon-acoustic epistle/hippy-dippy number that will please people like me who are unapologetically into, oh, The Moody Blues (not the goddam "poems" ffs) and/or early Donovan. Sure, it's meandering as. But haven't you gone for a ramble in the countryside and not really minded (in both senses of the term) where you were going?
The Hypnogogue is like that. It doesn't have a direction, quite. But longtime fans won't mind. It's really more of a collection than it's an album, if you know what I mean. I only wish they'd made it a tight ten-song thingy -- and put out a follow-up EP or something. I know that's quibbling; I realize it's downrightishly sacrilegious, but hey, I reckon by the time I spin it for the sixth or seventh time I'm gonna want to retract not a few of my detractions here. Get it and see what you think, Churchmate.
*John Andrew Frederick is the leader of The Black Watch. The band just released their latest album, Future Strangers, which you can order here. My review of Future Strangers is here.
[Photo: Hugh Stewart]