Listening to "Back with Two Beasts"

UPDATE: After another round of listening to the album, I'm extremely unhappy with how this post turned out. I'll try it again sometime soon. After all, true writing is rewriting.
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For my two or three faithful readers, it should come as no surprise that I’ve become more obsessed than ever with the band The Church. Their recent songs have completely blown me away. But it may surprise you to know that until the release of Untitled #23, I always considered The Church to be a hit or miss band. Even on their early albums like Starfish or Gold Afternoon Fix, which spoke deeply to me and served as my soundtrack as I struggled through high school, there were always one or two stinkers that didn’t do anything for me. Off the top of my head, I specifically remember “Disillusionist” (Priest=Aura) and “Chaos” (Gold Afternoon Fix). Typically these songs were the longer ones that indulged Kilbey’s sometime rambling lyrical style, but often it could be one of tone: when The Church are at their best, all four instruments play off of each other like the best bands, but specifically Koppes and MWP’s guitars chime and ring and pulse all around you as you descend into a dreamscape world… a pretentious way of stating that the songs really do try and take you to another place.

The songs that fail to transport you to another place – or at least don’t feel as convincing as their best work – are the ones that I would remove from mix tapes or iPods. As the band entered its "middle phase" - roughly the albums after Priest=Aura and before After Everything Now This – their tendency to produce half-baked songs was particularly egregious. The worst was Magician Among the Spirits, where half of the songs are unlistenable and/or just stupid – but this album also provides us with essential gems like “Comedown” and “Ladyboy”, proving that you can never discount Kilbey and the boys.

The last few Church albums have been much more consistent, culminating to me with the Untitled #23 disk which doesn't contain a bad song in the bunch. (Although, to be honest, I don't listen to “Space Savior” or “On Angel Street” a lot, but I don’t think that’s a failure of the songs; they just don’t do anything for me personally.) One of these days I’ll have to write about Untitled #23, but currently I’m playing the Back with Two Beasts album.

Back with Two Beasts was recorded during the Uninvited, Like the Clouds disk, and essentially contains the songs that didn’t make it onto that disk. What an embarrassment of riches! The album is a classic of I guess you’d term psychedelic rock, with chiming feedback swirling around pounding bass and grooving drums, Kilbey’s seen-it-all and yet still engaged stoner talk speak underlying it all. But to qualify it just like that would be to discount the poppy jems of “Pearls” and “Unreliable External”, which contain some killer Byrds-like riffs and are relatively straightforward. Of course, it wouldn’t be The Church without something obscure, and “Night Sequence” the 20 minute autobiographical (?) dream-movie (where Kilbey is a character in the song) serves that purpose. In short, the album is epic, sprawling, messy, inspiring, infuriating, and rocking – everything a good album should be.

Judge for yourself: you can download it here.