1981@40: OF SKINS AND HEART - THE CHURCH

A pair of barre chords, clean but hot ring out and repeat until the band enters to provide foundation and reinforcement. Steve Kilbey's first lines which contain the album's title force the centre of gravity with what would become one of the most recognisable voices in Australian music. Most of it could be form-fit power pop but there's some odd backing vocals which, though sung, sound like a jumble of a crowd in time and pitch. "Such strange things you say." This band would continue with this theme, too, with Kilbey's sculpted abstractions floating over what would grow increasingly to be a neo-pscyhedelia. All that in four minutes? Well, there's a lot of clear hindsight which covers the rest of the record.

Chrome Injury keeps it up with bright guitar breaks and chunky palm-muting. More forceful harmonies both in blocks and backing vocals extend the textural range but we're still in Boomtown Rats/Records style powerpop. The sense that a band with passable songs met producers who crammed them into a new wave packing case. It's not bad at all. It's very listenable but it's also like almost everything else on the radio which is the main problem. The last one of these I did for this blog was Prayers on Fire which sounded like nothing on the radio. I made a big thing of how filmsy a value timelessness is when regarding music of significance or power. I've just remembered another dimension. This music works and worked then because it had a sound form a time when most things like it also sounded fine, the aesthetic itself is dependable. So, is it unremarkable just because it's sounds like 1981? Well, no, it is remarkable because better writing that offers peaks makes its best stand out. We're about to hear the biggest single the band released.

The Unguarded Moment starts with overdriven guitars swirling around a colourful figure. The band kicks in with a clear lead riff before the vocals start. Same deadpan but melodic tone over chugging muted guitars that break into swells of chords and then the pre-chorus line and the line of the chorus surprise with a clear ringing descant vocal soaring above the Kilbey foghorn and we're in the land of the hit single. If you listen today you might find the arrangement over reliant on needless repetition but there's a solid attitude and clear sense of narrator in the songs that wipes out all lingering on how the words are nicer sounding than substantial. "So deep, deep without a meaning." Steve Kilbey was asked the following year if he would mind if someone else in the band came up with a song that was deep without a meaning. He said that, frankly he wouldn't want to be in a band playing other people's songs. We were ready for boycott him (for about five and a half minutes) but he was right. He wasn't the sole songwriter in the band nor even the only lead vocalist but the stoner minstrel character he created for the rest of the decade remains one of the most immediate public personae that anyone of his peers produced. That put him on the same rung as Nick Cave (and both of them well above the old school pouting of a Michael Hutchence). Long after this hit could be found in op shops the sound of bright guitars around the voice that lived somewhere between Geezer Gangster and Bob Geldof you knew you were listening to The Church. After a soaring vocal coda and tasteful solo the riffs leave the song in symmetrical order. End. And you want to hear it again.

And so it goes. Little stands out  but it doesn't have to. An edible feast of swirls, chunks, textures and tunes. You can leave it on. The single stands out but mostly because its craft is superior. The rest doesn't sound like filler as much as the sound of the times (remember, that's a good thing) But then something happens.

A mellotron track of male choral voices with a bass playing harmonics. Kilbey's voice comes in well under this as though it's approaching on the path to the front door. A lithe guitar begins a raga rock figure as the vocal gets closer. Another guitar plays a tinkling arpeggio in the distance. A constant series of declared images (deep but low meaning) ends with the question of the title: Is This Where You Live? The band picks up substance and drive for further verses. From this point until the dismantling ending the song could be any of the others but that the power pop section is just a passage in a setting of something genuinely grand lifts the entire thing up to where the single was feeling so lonely. Too long to be a single by itself, it's the album's epic which would become an obligatory feature of most of the band's '80s output. It's a joy.

The rest is a trio of songs that, like those that follow Unguarded Moment, serves perfectly well to round out the album as a document of what a feisty guitar pop record sounded like back in '81. If it sounds like it's calculated for that effect it's probably best to put most of the blame on the producers but if you do don't forget to celebrate these points of identity and recall how their trails were still being felt decades later when new guitar pop bands were being celebrated for ... something ... when really they were couching their songs in sounds that while once current and vital had become serviceable for conemtporary use. Yes, there is a big slice of late '60s psychedelia (they are on Parlophone!) in this record but it's not slavishly applied, it's rather allowed to influence. I can imagine Steve Kilbey singing a perfect Syd Barret cover I just never heard him do it.