For a Moment We're Strangers

By chrome3d

It sounds so perky and upbeat. It's a perfect opener and tells what kind of album it will be. It's not extremely remarkable or memorable but it works like a train for what it´s supposed to be: an introduction to the band or a manifesto of their style. The announcement that we are here and this is how we do it. I listened to this song 7 times in a row and it has a lot of stuff going on. I have a CD-Rs for cartrips and the first one is Of Skins and Heart-Heyday. I usually have it on random but most of the times not. Every time I drive out to the street and this first song starts it makes me so happy. It's excellent for driving as it has a lot of drive! The song is rock but with The Church it's never straightforward. While many would have made the song more linear, it's clear that the band has more complexities inside them. There is actually quite many parts in the song and the twin guitars have to show many tricks all contained in the 3:57 that it takes. They want to show all they have and the first song is bursting with ideas and directions. In the end they have to to do ooh-aah lines that travel from left to right just to show that trick too.

It's very much in the vein of the then fashionable new wave but there lies also under currents of 60es jangle and of course Byrds and whatever. I think I see David Bowie there too but he is also a figure that looms heavily over the early Church. A band on their debut album usually wears their influences on their sleeves, but with The Church even at their beginning it's hard to pinpoint the exact source of inspiration.Maybe because the source of inspiration is always somehow within them and the outside world is only mirrored in their actions. It sounds perhaps too grand as it's only a popsong but you know that it's true.

"In the empty place the soul stripped bare
Of skins and heart and I come apart
In your icy hands
I forget my role, as I stare into your soul"

The first verse and Steve starts his journey that he has never stopped. Even those couple of lines evoke so many images, but none of them is simple or stupid. It hints at sexuality in some words, good thing in the context of a young rockband, but of course it quickly turns in to intellectual melodrama and the man is staring at the soul of the uninterested woman. He is never content to being just a brute (his role as the icon of adoration) but brings the intellectual side in play and that's the way it will be in the future too. Deep without a meaning is the line that always comes up when I think about this album.