A funny thing happened on the road to nostalgia for the Church. They
took a detour and became relevant.
The initial route was a familiar one. After slowly building an
audience, they scored a Top 30 hit, "Under the Milky Way," several
albums into their career. The pressure to repeat their success nearly
destroyed the band. Last summer they played Showcase Live, a venue at a
football stadium's complex whose main selling point to suburban
audiences is vast amounts of free parking, key for acts that are just
trading on their long-past glories. The typical chain of events for
such bands is that, if they even bother to record new material, it is
at best forgettable but provides an excuse to tour. At worst, it
squanders their legacy.
But that isn't what happened to the Church. The band is celebrating it
30th anniversary with a special tour. They deserved better than the
nostalgia circuit room they played in Foxboro last year and got it with
Somerville's Arts at the Armory on April 21. The gimmick of the tour is
that they play one song from each album in reverse chronological order,
starting with 2009's Untitled #23.
The surprise to casual fans is that their newer material is worthy of
both the band and the audience. Admittedly, the group have winnowed
their following, but this was a crowd who was in it for the long haul,
not the ones who would be disappointed that they didn't faithfully
recreate "Reptile" from its Starfish
incarnation.
In honor of the occasion, they provided a program highlighting their
career, including a page devoted to each album and concluding with an
inventory of their career, cataloging everything from the number of
concerts played to the number of overdoses. Combining their
between-song banter, mostly from Steve Kilbey but with the others
chiming in, and the written materials about their releases, the full
narrative emerged. Their label largely ignored them in the early '80s
in favor of acts like Loverboy. They eventually hit pay dirt and sold a
bunch of albums, but that same success tore the band apart. They
eventually regained their footing as the '90s progressed, with
guitarist Peter Koppes rejoining the band, Tim Fowles settling in
behind drums and the band finding a new creative freedom, in part from
shedding expectations. They've weathered the failure of several indie
labels by ultimately creating their own imprint.
It was a journey through their history, but they chose to not
necessarily retrace their steps. They billed it as an intimate space,
which manifested itself as a very casual atmosphere with no electric
guitars. Since two of their albums were built around reinterpretations
of their own songs, they were hardly married to their past. For
example, they stripped away the layers of "Almost Yesterday." "The
Unguarded Moment" felt like a Velvet Underground cover song.
"Invisible" took the train theme of its lyrics as the basis for its
tempo variations, speeding up then slowing down like a training pulling
into the station.
They broke the proceedings into two sets then returned for two encores.
For their first encore, they offered up the Smashing Pumpkins song
"Disarm" as a thank you and response to their
cover of "Reptile." They
followed it up with "Space Saviour" from Untitled #23
that was so hypnotic it practically induced seizures and left audience
drowning in puddles of their own drool. They wrapped up the evening
with "Grind;" Marty Willson-Piper peppered it with Led Zeppelin-worthy
fat riffs, but the rendition also lived up the song's own lyrics of
"jangled decay." The band proved themselves worthy of the 30th
anniversary celebration.
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