Album of the Day 6/26/11

Today is Day Two of the Montreal Jazz Festival and the core crew here is taking it in: details soon. In the meantime, as we do every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Sunday’s album is #583:

Marty Willson-Piper – Nightjar

The preeminent twelve-string guitarist of our time, Marty Willson-Piper is also a powerful and eclectic lyrical rock songwriter, much like Steve Kilbey, his bandmate in legendary Australian art-rockers the Church. This 2009 masterpiece is every bit as good as any of his albums with that band. Willson-Piper proves as adept at period-perfect mid-60s Bakersfield country (the wistful A Game for Losers and the stern The Love You Never Had) as he is at towering, intense, swirlingly orchestrated anthems like No One There. The album’s centerpiece, The Sniper, is one of the latter, a bitter contemplation of whether murder is ever justifiable (in this case, there’s a tyrant in the crosshairs). There’s also the early 70s style Britfolk of Lullaby for the Lonely; the casually and savagely hilarious eco-anthem More Is Less; the even more brutally funny Feed Your Mind; the blistering, sardonic rocker High Down Below;and the vividly elegaic Song for Victor Jara. Here’s a random torrent; the cd is still available from Second Motion.

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The Oxygen Ponies’ Exit Wounds Leaves a Mark

The Oxygen Ponies’ 2009 album Harmony Handgrenade was a ferocious, lyrical art-rock masterpiece, one of the best releases of recent years: you can find it on our Best Albums of All Time list. Written during the waning days of the Bush regime, it’s a chronicle of love under an occupation. On the band’s new album Exit Wounds, frontman Paul Megna revisits similarly tortured terrain, this time more personal than political. For the most part, this is an album of snarling kiss-off songs, with psychedelic, anguished epic grandeur juxtaposed against stark Leonard Cohen-esque passages. The band this most closely resembles is Australian art-rock legends the Church, both in terms of the stunningly catchy simplicity of Megna’s melodies, the hypnotic sweep of the production and the clever, literate savagery of his lyrics.

“The velvet rope around your neck pulled you away,” he intones in his signature rasp in the opening track, Hollywood, as the band pulses with a trancey post-Velvets sway behind him. “Did you sell your face so you could buy the farm out at Maggie’s place?” he asks. But this isn’t merely an indictment of a starstruck, clueless girl: it indicts an entire generation. As Megna reaffirms later on with the amusing I Don’t Want Yr Love: after a pretty hilarious Lou Reed quote, he makes it clear that he doesn’t “want to be anywhere you are ’cause all the people there are blinded by the stars.” The outgoing mantra of “nobody loves you anymore” is just plain brutal: it makes a great outgoing message for anyone in need of some post-breakup vengeance. And the cello-driven This Disaster offers a more expansive view of the wreckage leading up to the big dramatic rift, Megna musing that “If all we have left is one technicolor kiss, I’d rather be the standin than the star.”

Hope and Pray is pure schadenfreude – it could be the great missing track from the Jesus & Mary Chain’s Darklands, but with better production values. “Hope the further down you go, the higher is the climb,” Megna snarls. He follows that with the bitter lament Good Thing, crescendoing out of spare, plaintive folk-pop with a cynical fury:

This is a call to everyone
Wake your daughters, rouse your sons
Take your aim and shoot to kill
So your friends don’t hurt you
‘Cause others will

Hornet, a dead ringer for a Steve Kilbey song, offers a backhanded compliment to a femme fatale, “Dancing around like a flame in the fire/As hot as it gets you don’t have to perspire.” They revert to Jesus & Mary Chain mode for Wild Animals, a more subtle putdown: “You think you’re smart, that each work of art ended up a failure,” Megna taunts. The indomitable Drink Myself Alive packs a punch, its undeterred narrator only willing to change his wicked ways if the girl who’s bedeviled him will do the same. With a distantly Beatlesque swing, Land That Time Forgot wouldn’t be out of place in the Spottiswoode catalog: it works both as a tribute to an individualist and a nasty slap at trendy conformists: “You’re walking around ahead of the crowd, such happiness is never allowed,” Megna sneers. He reprises that theme on the sparse, more gentle Jellybean with its torrents of lyrics:

Everyone around me is just sharing the same brain…
I guess they find it’s easier to be part of the whole
Searching for a reason why they buy the shit they’re sold.

The album ends on a completely unexpected note with the pretty, backbeat pop hit Christmas Every Morning. The album is out now on insurgent Brooklyn label Hidden Target Records, the same folks who put out Randi Russo’s brilliant new Fragile Animal a couple months ago. This one’s in the same league: it’s hard to imagine a better album than this coming out any time this year. Watch this space for upcoming NYC dates.

Album of the Day 2/14/11

Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Monday’s album is #715:

The Church – Hologram of Baal

The one band featured on this list more than any other, this is the Australian art-rockers’ big 1998 comeback: in a way, it perfectly encapsulizes their career. It’s got lush, gorgeous janglerock songs like Anesthesia and Louisiana; hypnotic, swirling, atmospheric mood pieces like Another Earth; the brutal satire of Tranquility and The Great Machine; the blistering multitracked guitars of No Certainty Attached; the hauntingly elegaic This Is It; and the album’s two most compelling cuts, the characteristically enigmatic yet irresistibly catchy Buffalo – which could be a wintry love song – and Ricochet. Lead guitarist Peter Koppes had rejoined the band after a five-year absence and bassist Steve Kilbey had rediscovered his lyrical muse, and everyone sounds completely reinvigorated. It’s a good way to get to know the band if you’re new to them. The Church are currently on US tour with stops in New York at the Highline on Feb 16 and B.B. King’s on the 17th. Here’s a random torrent.

Peter Koppes of the Church Offers the Scoop on the Band’s 2011 US Tour

Peter Koppes’ rich, darkly majestic lead lines, fiery riffage and judicious jangle alongside Rickenbacker guitarist Marty Willson-Piper’s incisive clang and frontman Steve Kilbey’s melodic bass have been a defining component of the Australian art-rockers sound for the better part of the band’s thirty-year history. The Church are currently on US tour, with stops in New York at the Highline Ballroom on February 16 and at B.B. King’s on the 17th. With his thousand-yard stare onstage, Koppes projects a restless intensity; offstage, his unselfconscious warmth and stinging wit come as a welcome surprise. With some rockers, trying to get their opinion is like pulling teeth. Not this guy:

Lucid Culture’s Correspondent: I understand that on this tour, you’re doing three of your classic albums – Starfish, from 1988; Priest = Aura, from 1991, and Untitled #23, from 2009, at each show. The buzz on the west coast where you are now is that you’re doing them in reverse chronological order – is that the same way you’ll be doing them in New York?

Peter Koppes: Yes. I thought in some ways that Priest = Aura would be a great culmination of the three album set. But funny enough, with the earlier albums in the later part of the set, you have a trajectory. In a live peformance, you have to have a climax, you have to knock the socks off the audience.

LCC: So are you doing the songs on the albums one after the other, as they appear?

PK: Yes. We’ve really never done anything like this – the Cure have, Trilogy, which I particularly enjoyed actually. Doing Untitled #23 first is like being our own support act. That leaves the nostalgia aspect to look forward to.

LCC: I actually think your idea of Priest = Aura to finish the night would send everybody home on a high note…

PK: Having Priest = Aura in the set is the artistic high point, the overlooked, monumental masterpiece of the band. So many of the songs are timeless – lyrically, they have as much resonance as they did when the album came out. The Disillusionist, for example. We were recording the album during the first Iraq war: all the images of the Kuwait bombing were a feeling for us at the time that still resonates throughout it…But then when we come back for Starfish we have an encore. You know, you have to have a reverie, and then a wake…

LCC: That’s an awful lot of songs. I’ve seen you jam out so many of your songs in concert over the years: is the jam aspect going to be constrained by the sheer volume of material?

PK: No. We jam Chaos; there’s the interlude on Destination where we improvise, and Hotel Womb, and Reptile – we take those a bit further just to push the dynamic. So that aspect of our show won’t completely change.

LCC: On recent tours you’ve been doing some pretty radical reinventions of your older songs, even some of the iconic ones, Under the Milky Way, Unguarded Moment, etcetera. Are there going to be moments where you’re playing piano, Steve is playing your Strat and Marty is playing bass, or are you going to stick with pretty much assigned roles?

PK: We try to maintain our particular instruments that we play on the albums. But on another tangent, we’ve freed up Steve from playing bass on some of the more intricately worded songs – on The Disillusionist, for example – so that he can carry the lyrics. Remember, Steve started out like that, as a lead singer without an instrument, in a band called Baby Grand in Canberra that I was in. We’re just trying to maximize the best possibilities for the band. There are other times where I play the keyboard because that was my part on the record, where Steve typically plays guitar. On Anchorage, Marty uses my guitar: I play both basses on the song on the record; now we have our roadie playing the other bass and the assistant manager onstage singing as well!

LCC: The most recent show of yours I saw was Irving Plaza in 07 I think, with a concert harpist sitting in. Anyone else along with you for the tour?

PK: Craig Wilson – he’s like having two extra people in the band, keyboards and guitar – he’s become a bit of a star, playing both at the same time sometimes.

LCC: How does he do it? Tapping the frets?

PK: He puts the pedal on and frets the chord and plays the keyboard at the same time.

LCC: How did you find this guy?

PK: Our drummer had a band he was producing, Astreetlightsong, and he’s the lead singer actually.

LCC: You have Tim Powles on drums. Steve has gone on record as saying he’s the best drummer you’ve ever had, do you agree?

PK: Tim Powles is one of the most important members of the band we’ve ever had. He managed the band with his wife’s production company at a time when we were trying to start up again. He’s a producer – he and I produced the “return” albums, Hologram of Baal, After Everything Now This, and so on. He’s also doing the upcoming show at Sydney Opera House, with the orchestra, which is really getting to be complicated, I was just on the phone about it before you called…

LCC: You’re playing with a full orchestra? I hope you’re recording that!

PK: We are, actually. It’s not the complete ensemble, with eight double basses, but we will have two double basses, a string quartet and a horn section.

LCC: Your shows on this tour, from what I understand, are routinely selling out. For a thirty-year-old band touring without a new album, unless you’re U2 or the Police doing a final tour, you realize that this is unheard of in America these days! Rock tours are tanking left and right: at Irving Plaza, where you’ve played a couple of times here in New York, cancellations seem to outnumber actual shows…

PK: I hadn’t realized how bad the economy is here. The response to the tour has really helped us – it’s an expensive tour, with all the extra personnel playing, and these sit-down venues…I’ve always said, “Lie by fashion, die by fashion.” We have a legacy of thirty years of playing music that hasn’t necessarily kowtowed to commercial markets…MTV seemed to think that their idea of music was better than our idea of music – and look who’s still around! I don’t think MTV should be allowed to do music awards!

LCC: MTV still has music awards? I haven’t watched MTV in ages.

PK: They are the barometer for what’s most wrong with combining music and business together…

LCC: How’s the merch table doing? Will you have any left by the time you get to New York?

PK: Believe it nor, we’ve doubled the amount of merch being bought. I think substance is style – that’s always been my motto. Style is vacuous and empty. Someone I know the other day said that fashion is infinite: it’s never complete, the beauty of is is that is always evolving. Music should be evolving too. I think that if somebody buys one of our t-shirts in a way that’s a statement that they share that kind of view…

LCC: As you may know, we have a daily gimmick around here to help draw traffic from around the web. These days we’re counting down the 1000 best albums of all time, and before that we did the 666 best songs. And we decided that the greatest song of all time was Destination by the Church. I think it deserves that because it captures the state of humanity in our time and place more perfectly, more poetically than any other song. Where do you think Destination fits in your catalog – is it one you take a measure of pride in, or is it just another song for you?

PK: That’s great. We don’t haggle about comments like that! I’m impressed that you would choose that one, it’s got a very progressive edge, more than a simple pop song. Musically and lyrically, it definitely was inspired. And Steve would agree.

LCC: Can I ask you how you get that amazing, eerie, sustained guitar tone? What kind of rig are you using onstage these days?

PK: I use Black Star amps with a Vox guitar amp, which has like an inimitable sound that’s kind of midrangy. For awhile I was doing Marshalls and things like that. I’ve found out how to replicate the sound out of the Leslie speaker boxes that I used to have on tour. The roadies didn’t like carrying them! So I reverted to Marshalls; now I have a couple of Black Stars for bottom and top – some are actually handwired like the old Voxes. The sound I get apart from a mix of overdrives is from a Leslie replicator pedal.

LCC: You mean one of those Boss boxes you can get at a guitar store?

PK: That’s the one. The big-part sound of the Church that sounds like a keyboard pedal is actually a harmonizer combined with a reverb unit. You know the horn part on Crash/Ride, on the Beside Yourself album? For that I put an ebow through this device. There are places on the records where I play the bass, the guitar and replicate an actual orchestra.

LCC: Does that mean that your music is going in a more complicated direction?

PK: Jazz is where we’re heading now, in a Burt Bacharach sense…

LCC: In terms of rhythm? Odd time signatures?

PK: Not so much odd time signatures but harmony. It’s a natural progression, we’re not the only band to have done it. For example, Hendrix used to use a flat 5 chord that was definitely jazz. He learned it from Eddie Kramer, who engineered all those records. Eddie Kramer was a jazz keyboard player – Hendrix heard it, copied it for Purple Haze, Voodoo Chile…likewise, Neil Young, on Cinnamon Girl with the double drop D chord changes the rest of the chords to jazz chords…that’s why we did the Pangaea ep. There were some songs that came out of the Untitled #23 session that didn’t gel with the album, with their jazzy aspects; they’re only on the double vinyl version of the album.

LCC: How have the relationships in the band changed over the years? There have been some rocky periods – how is the chemistry these days?

PK: The band is a bunch of vectors and energies, and directions change, individuals as well. For example, Marty runs the business of the band now so he’s much more broadminded about why certain things are good to do for the greater picture. Everybody has to compromise to a certain extent, and Steve to his credit has realized that. If you remember the hall of fame speech that he made in Australia recently, he’s gone from being aloof to a sort of master of ceremonies!

The Church play Highline Ballroom on February 16 at 7 PM and B.B. King’s on the 17th. Tickets are still available as/of today.

Album of the Day 1/28/11

Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues, all the way to #1. Friday’s album is #732:

The Church – Of Skins and Heart

Who would have known that when the Australian rockers came out with this one in 1981 that they’d still be going, absolutely undiminished, thirty years later (with New York shows at the Highline on Feb 16 and at B.B. King’s the next day). Blending the epic grandeur of Pink Floyd, David Bowie surrealism and the luscious jangle and clang of the Byrds, Steve Kilbey’s warily allusive lyricism here distantly foreshadows the visionary, apocalyptic turn he’d take later in the decade. The Unguarded Moment (a cover, actually, written by a friend of Kilbey’s at the time) is the iconic hit, sort of the Australian equivalent of Freebird. Opening with a blast of guitar fury, For a Moment We’re Strangers strips a cheap hookup to its sordid bones, while the ghostly, gorgeous Bel-Air hints at the otherworldly side they’d mine on albums like Priest=Aura. Other standout tracks include the roaring epic Is This Where You Live; the glimmering country slide guitar ballad Don’t Open the Door to Strangers; the Kinks-inflected Tear It All Away, and the hook-driven janglerock smash Too Fast for You. Even the straight-up powerpop like Fighter Pilot/Korean War, Chrome Injury (a new wave take on Iron Man), the proto-U2 Memories in Future Tense and the riff-rocking She Never Said all have their moments. Here’s a random torrent; a cd worth getting is the brand-new reissue that combines both the Australian and self-titled American release’s tracks along with extensive liner notes from twelve-string guitar genius Marty Willson-Piper.

The Genius of Georges Brassens Revealed for English Listeners

By all accounts, Pierre de Gaillande’s Bad Reputation cd is the first full-length album devoted to English-language versions of songs by legendary, obscene French songwriter Georges Brassens. Brassens was more punk than just about anybody: an atheist and a communist, his records were frequently banned by the authorities during his early years in the 1950s, which only fueled his popularity. His songs are irresistibly funny, driven by a snarling contempt for middle-class conformity and an unwavering populism. Why did Brassens never catch on here? De Gaillande sidestepped the question when we asked him last summer. It’s because Brassens’ arrangements are simple to the point of sometimes being threadbare. It’s obvious that Brassens saw himself as a poète maudit with guitar rather than a musician lyricist like Richard Thompson or Steve Kilbey. Here, de Gaillande (frontman and lead guitarist of two of this era’s finest art-rock bands, the Snow and Melomane) tersely and brilliantly fleshes out the arrangements with a frequently ominous blend of gypsy jazz and noir cabaret, featuring his Snow bandmates David Spinley on clarinet, Quentin Jennings on flute, charango and xylophone and Christian Bongers on bass. The result is fearlessly iconoclastic, vicious and hilarious: in other words, it does justice to the originals. And musically, it’s actually an improvement: de Gaillande’s strong, clear baritone adds nuance in a way that the gruff Brassens never could. The songs themselves date from the 40s (the shuffling title track, Brassens’ signature song, defiantly asserting that only the blind wouldn’t join in gleefully to watch his execution) – to the 70s (a literally obscenely funny version of Don Juan).

Brassens didn’t suffer fools gladly, and he had could smell a hypocrite a mile away. Those qualities brought out the cynic in him, front and center here on Public Benches (Les Amoureux des bancs publics). While the masses may see them as fit “for only the impotent or the obese,” they’re actually quite romantic. The song goes on as a ringing and surprisingly uncynical endorsement of PDA – for awhile anyway, until it becomes clear that the point is to let the young lovers have their way since the sum total of their happiness together will pretty much be limited to their time sitting in the park. Likewise, To Die For Your Ideas (Mourir pour des idées) lampoons the limousine liberals who can’t tell the difference between an idea that’s worth sacrificing oneself for and one that’s not, despite all evidence including the “killing fields and mass graves.” That one’s done as a deadpan duet with eclectic chanteuse Keren Ann.

The best songs here are the most harshly funny ones, which resonate with innumerable levels of meaning. On one hand, Don Juan lauds the lothario who’d rescue a lonely woman from a sad, otherwise permanent virginal state, along with the nun who “defrosted the penis of the amputee.” On the other, it’s a sendup of any wannabe ladies man who’d count a night with an utterly undesirable woman as a notch on the belt. The Pornographer rather disingenuously tries to play off Brassens’ sexually explicit lyrics as a decision to relent and give the people what they want – and the images are so over-the-top ridiculous, and perfectly rendered in English, that this version is no less entertaining or explicit than the original. The dilemma is revisited even more entertainingly on Trumpets of Fortune and Fame (Les Trompettes de la renommeé), a snide look at celebrity: then as now, sex sells.

There are three other angry classics here. On one level, Ninety-Five Percent gives a shout-out to a woman who wants sex with love; on another, it’s a springboard for another spot-on, obscenity-laden Brassens spoof of a wannabe stud. The resolutely swinging anticonformist anthem Philistines quietly takes pride in the “unwanted progeny” that the unthinking masses assume will grow up to be cleanshaven accountants: instead, they’re all going to turn into shaggy poets. And the savage I Made Myself Small (Je me suis fait tout petit) drips with equal amounts of contempt for the jealous bitch who’ll spear a flower with her parasol lest her boyfriend think it more attractive than she is, and for the spineless wimp who’ll let her get away with it. The rest of the album includes the wry Princess and the Troubadour (La princesse et le croque-notes), a missed opportunity for statutory rape; Penelope, a cynical look at seducing a married woman, and the surprisingly upbeat, proletarian Song for the Countryman (Chanson pour l’auvergnat).

De Gaillande’s translations match Brassens’ original lyrics in both rhyme and meter, an impressive achievement by any standard, fortuitously enabled by Brassens’ habit of continuing a single, long phrase over the course of several bars. It’s even more impressive considering how well the double entendres and slang of the original have been rendered here. In a couple of instances, de Gaillande mutes the dirty words: for example, in Ninety-Five Percent, “s’emmerde” is translated as “bores her out of her mind” rather than “pisses her off.” But in the spirit of Brassens, he adds an emphatic “fuck” or two where there were none before. Several of the translations’ subtleties are genuinely exquisite: for example, in To Die for Your Ideas, de Gaillande alludes to a guillotine rather than the scaffold in the original lyric. And in Trumpets of Fortune and Fame, he chooses to translate “pederasty” literally rather than going with its usual connotation (“pédérastique” is a somewhat dated way of saying “gay”). Francophones will have a field day comparing all these side by side (one reason why this review has been in the works for such a long time – the album’s official release was this summer). Pierre de Gaillande plays this album with his band along with special guests Joel Favreau (Brassens’ lead guitarist) and Favreau’s longtime collaborator, keyboardist Jean-Jacques Franchin Friday, December 17 at 9 PM at the 92YTribeca on Hudson St.

Album of the Day 11/25/10

Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Thursday’s album is #796:

The Church – The Blurred Crusade

Since the American Thanksgiving holiday is one of our famously high-traffic days, we wish a happy one to those who celebrate it with a band you might just see again on this page. This 1982 classic is the legendary Australian art-rockers’ jangliest album, if not their most lyrically rich – on all but the gorgeously ghostly Field of Mars (named after a cemetery in Sydney), it sounds as if frontman Steve Kilbey wrote them in a rush on the way to the studio. But the melodies are sublime, a lush, rich wash of clanging, overtone-drenched Rickenbacker guitar textures. Almost with You features a beautiful flamenco-inflected acoustic guitar solo from Peter Koppes; When You Were Mine, An Interlude and You Took are big anthems and concert favorites. Just for You and To Be in Your Eyes are among the band’s Byrdsiest songs. Each of the album sides ends with a beautiful, barely two-minute miniature: Secret Corners and Don’t Look Back. Because we’ve carefully considered all the feedback we’ve received from you people out there, we’re generally trying to limit this list to one album per band. We just might make an exception for these guys. Here’s a random torrent; there’s also a brand-new cd reissue out with extensive new liner notes by guitarist Marty Willson-Piper.

The Best Song of Alltime

Our daily best 666 songs of alltime countdown is officially over: almost two years from the date we started counting these down, here’s the best song ever:

The Church – Destination

Why did we pick this one? Because it so tersely and succinctly captures our era. Great art is timeless: this macabre rock epic hasn’t aged a bit since 1988, when released as the first track on the classic, platinum Starfish album. It starts suspensefully, Peter Koppes and Marty Willson-Piper’s guitars playing a fifth interval, neither major nor minor. Then Marty bends a string, an eerie minor third and the procession is underway:

Our instruments have no way of measuring this feeling
Can never cut below the floor, or penetrate the ceiling

All we can ever know is what we perceive: trapped within our senses, there is no exit:

In the space between our houses, some bones have been discovered
The whole procession lurches on, as if we have recovered…

All is not well: an understatement. Yet we pay no mind:

Draconian winter unforetold
One solar day, suddenly you’re old
That little envelope just leaves me cold
Makes destination start to unfold

The “Draconian winter” is the one line that dates this song: global warming hadn’t yet rendered that phrase obsolete. Yet it still works on a metaphorical leve. “One solar day,” a phrase from Indian mysticism, meaning an eon. And the drugs don’t work anymore – in fact they might kill you instead.

Our documents are useless, all forged beyond believing
Page 47 isn’t signed, I need it by this evening
In the space between our cities, a storm is slowly forming
Something eating up our days, I feel it every morning…

A reference to a recording contract? Probably – Steve Kilbey’s written some of the best diatribes about the music business. But maybe also a passport, a visa? Which means nothing to the corrupt officials or the Halliburton subcontractors at the border.

It’s not a religion, it’s just a technique
It’s just a way of making you speak
And distance and speed have left us too weak
And Destination looks kind of bleak

That’s a reference to the band themselves. But it could also be a lot of other things – including torture.

Our elements are burnt out, our beasts have been mistreated
I tell you it’s the only way we’ll get this road completed
In the space between our bodies, the air has grown small fingers
Just one caress, you’re powerless…Destination…

And we’re left incapable of changing course. Of course, we aren’t really: apocalyptic art is cautionary, it reminds us that this will happen if we don’t heed the warning. It’s in our hands now.

Tomorrow we start counting down the 1000 best albums of alltime.

Song of the Day 7/6/10

Lots of new stuff coming up in the wake of the long weekend – check back later today, or later in the week. In the meantime, our best 666 songs of alltime countdown will reach #1 in just over three weeks.  Tuesday’s song is #23:

The Church – Disenchanted

Janglerock guitar doesn’t get any more exquisitely beautiful than this, Marty Willson-Piper’s twelve-string Rickenbacker meshing with Peter Koppes’ Strat. And Steve Kilbey’s excoriating, cynical lyric about the pitfalls of celebrity is one of his best. From the Heyday album, 1986.

Song of the Day 6/29/10

Only thirty more days til our best 666 songs of alltime countdown reaches #1! Tuesday’s song is #30:

The Church – For a Moment We’re Strangers

Opening with a blast of guitar fury uncommonly intense even for this band, it’s the most disquietingly accurate portrait of a one-night stand ever set to music:

In the empty place the souls strip bare
Of skins and heart
And they come apart
In your icy hands
I forget my role
As I stare into your soul

A title track of sorts from the iconic Australian art-rock band’s 1981 debut album.