SHADOW CABINET

now... it's happening, words loose meaning, become sound, moving through the song, jingle jangle, lots of subtle tones, some portal type moment, looping and melting and ringing their way through the aether manifest speakers, glissando transmission, aural entry , vibration hits the drum and links with synaptic systems, neural networks form, connect the dots, intricate chemical transmissions and feedback loops as veils are broken like spider webs falling apart in fast forwards, smashing through all previous known imprints. the elves doth dance with the fairie and there in luminosity penetrating sun drenched tranquil summers, when the words start listen up carefully for all is not well in the kingdom, clouds on the horizon speed towards us, the lush texture begins to fracture in word. 


now...certain shadow has befallen the picture, vowels have angles shape and form, the wind is gluttonous, oaths and oafs interfere, drink sink forget, she offered her chaos, proffered herself, the eldritch bitch must have muddled her spells, trees cut down for factories...

now...time has cast itself across the kingdom, darkness of another age, the dark lord has won the war and left the pretty cabinet.

this is such a great song, i don't know why, like all the church songs i write about it's hard to define what makes it great. the words i guess, but on that layer of music to carry them, melody and tone, i think it's something even more the sum being greater than the parts.
there's magic in this song. it sits in the shadows, unseen un-obvious, cascading and undulating on the back of every beat, it's lurking within the space between and then it hits you with it's glamour in that lovely break. 


i saw them play this live once, it was quite wonderful as the song took on an edge it didn't possess in the recorded version, steve seemed to sing with a certain anger almost bitterness, it changed the whole energy of the song moving it into a different gear, the magic seemed to come out from the spaces, like a 3d picture where suddenly you get a glimpse of something malevolent and then it's gone. shadow cabinet is a definitive mysterious and cryptic song, i'm kinda glad i have no idea what it could be about and have avoided finding out, it's better this way, in my own mind, it's about as good as it gets. it's from the album remote luxury, i played this album non stop before i left london for berlin, it sits in my mind as a period of magick and strangeness, portals opening and closing, it was a soft time that was about to find its edge, it was a time of peace that was about to be broken, it was a time of love that drifted into sex without love but ultimately it was innocence about to become experience from which there would be no return. 
the church are the soundtrack to many things in my life, i guess having a brain injury where you loose a lot of your memories, music assists in recalling the feelings around certain times and by default then brings other memories to the surface, mostly during this part of my existence i began to see a bigger picture or at least look under the surface of things into those jungian shadow areas, inside... the... cabinet. 

Remote Luxury

It would be easy to dismiss the title song of Remote Luxury as just another instrumental, even though it´s just their second instrumental. The first one being the b-side The Golden Dawn. I listen to The Church mainly because SK sings there and the instrumentals are not so interesting by default. Listening to the instrumental repeatedly however reveals many things about it. It feels like a bridge between The Blurred Crusade-period and Heyday-period. A touch of Happy Hunting Ground there with the slow rhythym and feeling. The guitar washes and jangles that promise something for the future. That promise was definitely taken to the extreme with Heyday. Then the Blurred Crusade build-up with the keys. You know that keyboard sound used so many times in TBC? Like ancient organ creating a chant of mourning viking warriors or crusaders (heh, or something). I would like to know how it was created as it hasn´t been that widely used elesewhere. Mixed with higher sounding organ and the guitars it creates a quite dense atmosphere that makes the mind wonder to distant places. Almost as well as the songs with lyrics. I like to see it as an ancient story with crusaders and moments after the battle. Like a memory from the Blurred Crusade that is long gone and the new glorious era will soon begin. To me this song most of all represents a transitional period and the album between their masterpieces.

The most important thing to me with this song is that the next phase of their saga is perhaps one of their finest moments. I can hear a stadium full of people shouting and chanting for Heyday. Okay, let´s make it a theatre full of people...talking, muttering or even just thinking...the opening riff of Myrrh looped to hypnotic heights...a promise of a ride to heaven and back...

Heyday
Heyday
Heyday
Heyday
Heyday
Heyday
Heyday
Heyday
Heyday
Heyday!

Shadow Cabinet

by fandorin

Off Remote Luxury, Shadow Cabinet has the best, most elegant flow. It is the first song of The Church featuring that rushed, breathless atmosphere of mystery. I always love that slick sense of flying, rushing and soaring through atmo-, strato-, narcospheres... it's almost like a little sub-genre in The Church's catalogue. Myrrh comes to mind. Night Of Light, none on Starfish, the grandiose, slowed-down build-up of Essence, The Time Being... Untoward is a great later example of what i mean. Listening to songs like those makes me lose my sense of gravity.

This is where they take off and fly.

Now, how do they achieve that illusion of rapidly drifting through endless skies? I know it's all in your head and everyone perceives it differently.

(1) Take a quick, but not too fast 4/4 rhythm, make it insistent

(2) Avoid rapid harmonic changes into far-out keys

(3) thoroughly played quavers

(4) add a vocal line, chanting on one note

(5) certain very long held guitar/keyboard notes will add to the aero power

(6) slight exceptions will make it even flightier

All six features are there. So much for nuts and bolts.

A "chiming riff" by MWP, counterpointal notes by PK. Shadow Cabinet has a very eighties polyethylene shine. I always had the idea of Shadow Cabinet in completely different arrangements, from renaissance madrigal to folk ballad to metal thrasher. Slow it down, add huge guitars and let James Hetfield shout the chorus. "Junction fevaaarrr must have closed down the rayyyyyl..ah!!, the gluttonous wind keeps on nibbling the sayyyyylsyeaaaahh, queueing in the ruins in the wake of the gayyyyyle it's, harmony I sayyyeaaaAAAAhh!!" Hetfield!! Speed it up two times, add a screamer and you have a brilliant speed metal song. it would have worked magnificently in Heyday's sound costume as well as an elegic midtempo song on the opiated Priest=Aura. On the one hand, it has that openness, on the other, the sound they chose fits perfectly. It's one of the first signs of what to encounter on Heyday, just that the stark, detached style would morph into something more gentle, warmer.

A climax of the song was always that ultra-artificial solo section of toy keyboard and ebowed guitar dueling. Sounds highly improbable, but definitely works wonder! Lyrically, Shadow Cabinet has one of my favourite lines - "Bliss comes first as a jangling flood". Now that's a fucking tagline for The Church, isn't it?

Into My Hands

Cute and twee. There I said it. This song is really pretty but it´s a bit too cute and frustratingly twee. Boy meets girl la-la-laa. This is one of those nursery rhyme- kinda songs. One/album is okay, but two is pushing it. Into My Hands feels almost like a song off from Steve´s first solo album Earthed. I mean even if The Church goes to ultra slow widescreen mode (Old Flame, Summer, Invisible, On Angel Street) there is still something strong to hold it together. The songs have a structure even though they seem to be sculpted entirely from the thin upper clouds and stardust. Into My Hands is wandering on the edge of that magic kingdom but it can never enter the gates. In the middle of other colder and slightly gothic songs of the album Into My Hands gives a nice warm touch but when I focus to this one song it never lifts off from niceness to the dramatic heights they can bake seemingly out of thin air. It works well in the context of the album, whatever the album is here, but as a single song it´s far from what I expect from the band. Sorry.

Violet Town

There isn´t many songs about colours in The Church songbook. There is no songs about black, red, yellow, orange, green, purple or white. White Star Line exists but it´s not about white colour. Cobalt Blue is a new song but it never mentions blue. In Violet Town there is colours unlike in other songs. Violet describes the music of the band as a colour quite fittingly. The music they play is not happy and passionate like red, nor is it sad and blue. Therefore it has to be violet.

The drums are pounding and there is a sense of motion. Another song driven by drums. Marching fast like walking with a mission. Walking through the crowded town yet there is a sense of loneliness. Wandering the streets aimlessly when you are young. Sense of freedom is vast and it´s also heavy on the shoulders. Phantom busses drive by and the streets are empty. Inviolate town...the double meaning, sense of something under the surface. Scary yet gentle.

I love the part that starts at 1:40. It all spirals to mid-song chaotic climax. The hawk of the song. Dogs bark and amusement park rollercoaster ride drowns everything. Then the drums take it back on course: tum-tum-tum-tum. That´s what I remember from this song, the drums. All other instruments are playing a second fiddle.

10 000 Miles

10 000 Miles...is the kinda song they still play, SK and Marty together. Somewhere there near the red point (1.). With acoustic geetaars playing to the faithful. I listen to that stuff from boots, or at least read about it somewhere like the womb. I´m around the other red point (2.) and just about 10 000 Miles away. I wonder if I would go to see them if I was in Australia or if I was an australian. It would be easy to think so but then again it would be easy to think that as an australian my mindset would be different and I would rather enjoy the sun and surfing more than sitting in smoky dark rooms listening to music. Who knows, life is a mystery and there is always something better going on 10 000 miles away. If I made a journey and travelled 10 000 miles then there would probably be something even better 10 000 miles away.

Maybe These Boys

by Fandorin

The infamous Maybe These Boys! A pretty effective build-up, and it's actually quite fascinating in its blatant silliness. The only vaguely similar track in The Church's entire oeuvre is The Faith Healer from A Box Of Birds. I'd love to hear a live medley, with Maybe These Boys and Faith Healer frankensteined together.

Another lesson The Church have learned from Art and Prog Rock is the nullification of the blooze. No blues attached here. Steve Kilbey has sung black notes, red notes, fiery notes, icy-white notes, but rarely blue notes, and if he does, it always generates a certain "this is a stylistic mean" reaction in me. When he hits those high distant notes in the very entertaining great song Nose Dive. He gives it all in Faith Healer. Otherwise, there is nothing bluesy to be found. The Church's version of the blues is a different beast - Real Toggle Action, This Is It, There You Go...all those songs evoke a deadly bleak, tar-black blues vision, but I play these songs rarely. They elude the 12-bar-it's-raining-and-there-are-holes-in-my-fucking-roof-and-my-baby's-gone-blues blueprint, of course...

When the song drifts off, it's getting almost invisible. All the roaring, trumpeting pomposity is falling off, leaving a thin, almost ethereal ghostly vision of a song in the background! It's like a ghost remaining, after the song has died. Mind the vocoder!

Hey, I actually didn't slaughter it at all, did I?

A Month Of Sundays

I had to dig out the original CD copy of Remote Luxury to get in to the mood of the album. Many times the cover art of the album gives some kind of idea what kind of album it is, although with The Church many of the covers are very slightly if at all connected to the music. The closest neighbours of Remote Luxury, Seance and Heyday, give some kind of idea what´s inside the sleeve. Those are really strong visual statements and the message is carried to the music as well. Seance is an album of high crazy contrasts and bright pink (or blue) and Heyday is a warm, tapestry of irresistible happy times. Remote Luxury however doesn´t deliver much visual enjoyment as the image of the androgynous girl in the forest holding dry flowers doesn´t say much. It´s one of the weakest covers in the 80´s of the band. Somehow the visual feel of the album is captured better by the back cover. Plain aqua field and band members in a purple hued boxes. SK looks like a blonde and Ploogy like a girl. Only Marty and PK look like they mean it. There is something directionless in the packaging and it tells a lot about the content too. Many of the songs here are not their best moments and it doesn´t deliver a strong sense of presence.

Being directionless is not a problem A Month Of Sundays as it is the best song of the album. It has a strong presence and it´s a true revelation from start to beginning. The guitars are like the tidal waves splashing to the shore of a big ocean. Endlessly caressing the stones on the beach and perfecting their round forms little by little. I see the oceanic aqua-tinted hues of the back cover in this song more than the thers. The lone guitar jangles in a sad melancholic way like mandolin bleached in the sun and saltwater. Slowly it builds to jubilant chamber pop heights that could match the sparkle of Water Music by Handel. If you don´t know what it is then I can only say that it´s one of the biggest triumphs of excess the classic music has given to the world. Still there is a layer of wind by the ocean and distant whales on top of the whole thing.

This is one of the first songs to give direction to the future of the band 15-20 years later. The future where they will merge many styles, other than the guitar rock they started from, in a sublime way and always sound like themselves and no other. It´s quite fitting that the band plays this song on the tour of the new album Untitled #23 as this song has so much common with the new songs and their atmospheres. With some stretch of imagination I could see it somewhere in the song cycle of Untitled #23. 25 years later this is still fresh stuff.

A title like A Month Of Sundays has many meanings too and it can be seen in many ways. It can be just a month without much to do but it also means a very long time or dreary boring time ( I checked this out as I knew it was bound to be some kind of saying) . It can also be a directionless period where you don´t know what´s going to happen or something is not going to happen. To me it feels like a summer time on the beach and the feeling that it never ends. A time away from the usual routines of every day life. What it feels like when there is nothing exact to do but also the agony that comes from the knowledge that you can do everything. The freedom to choose anything that you want to do but you really don´t know what it is that you want. Being there in the start of adult life in the last summers before entering the real world with it´s obligations. Realizing that there is nobody else to make your future but yourself. The indifference of other people gives you a fright. You just have to figure it out yourself and there isn´t a readymade script to the story of your life.

No Explanation

by chrome3d

In the december of 1994 I saw The Church acoustic duo gig in Helsinki. It was only SK and Marty at this point but I guess I was still excited to see them. Of course I was disappointed at first that it wasn´t the whole deal but a compressed version of the vision. I was expecting to hear many songs from Starfish (then the best album ever) and Heyday (then almost the best album ever). To my surprise the setlist was more scattered and there was songs quite evenly from many albums. This is only my vague memory as no "official" records have been preserved from their short tour in our arctic circles.

They played at least 3 or 4 songs from Remote Luxury. I can´t say if No Explanation was one of them. Probably not as it doesn´t seem to belong to the usual setlists of that era. I was wondering why they played so many songs from an album that I viewed as inferior to the many other albums. This was just my view as I probably hadn´t seen a single review of Remote Luxury in local music rags. There was no internet back then to see what people really think about it. 10 000 Miles, Constant In Opal, Shadow Cabinet...at least those were played. After the night I listened to Remote Luxury with new eyes and saw that these songs were excellent material for acoustic gigs. Compared to the stuff in Heyday and Starfish this stuff doesn´t lose much when it´s performed by just two guys with acoustic guitars.

SK was perhaps more focused at that night but I remember Marty being an energetic performer (Your enthusiasm's contagious...) and the 12-string acoustics chimed in an unresistable way just like they do in No Explanation. It doesn´t matter if they played it or not. Now, 15 years later, in my head they did and I see this song as something that they should have played then. It´s sunny and bright atmosphere is something that I remember from that time.

Volumes

Volumes is the first The Church song written entirely by Marty Willson-Piper. It doesn´t feel out of place in the Remote Luxury LP album or Persia Ep, where it appeared first. It´s a fine song for a first (?) effort and it appeared also later on Marty´s first soloalbum In Reflection (1987). The version here in Remote Luxury is much better than the loose version found in In Reflection, which also suffers from the lo-fi production values. I feel that some of the rhyming is unnecessary and forced. Pages...ages, row...grow. Other than that there is not much to critcize. Marty has learned how to do a churchy song his own way. As usual, it´s a lot more direct and rock than the rest of the songs on the album. There must be some rock on every album and it´s good that Marty does his part.

There usually is cries over the fact that songs of Marty and PK break the flow of the album and this subject will appear over and over again in the future. I don´t usually feel this and it doesn´t bother me at all. In the case of Remote Luxury it´s also worthy to note that there isn´t much cohesive plot to break. The songs first appeared on a 5-song ep, then on 10-song LP with different track order and now on a 15 song CD remaster. It´s hard to say which song actually should follow the other on this album so it´s every song for themselves and Volumes fills it´s place quite nicely.

constant in opal

i recall wandering through a london record shop and seeing the cover of remote luxury, it struck me before i even knew it was the church. when i saw it was a record by the church i bought it immediately but i probably would have got it if it was a band unknown to me as i liked the cover, fickle youth that i was.
constant in opal was a song that i loved so much, i played it and played it over and over, not really understanding it, what was 'constant in opal'
that strange introduction with it's consistent tone that suddenly drops out, the jangle chords and then that strange lead sustained and intruding in, some synth textures with that baseline that weaves through, carrying the whole song.
what was steve singing about, to a 18 year old it was a mystery, i searched and searched that song for meaning but at the end of the day it was just a great song.
then many many years later i'm in australia, and i hear the live version, and the words take shape, like a jigsaw puzzle coming together, i see the picture take form. australia is known for its opals, people still go out prospecting and looking and some of these outback towns are just dusty and thirsty places. but then i realized the song was about a lot more for me, it was about the search within. the mining we do for inner truth and the jewels we find. and how some people search and some transform through that search, others don't find themselves this way.
now i had an even bigger connection to the band, i was also a puzzled traveller. searching looking within myself, attempting to find a jewel, often finding dust.

Violet Town

by fandorin

I was warned. I had asked the Music Sage who introduced me to The Church for a kind of commented band history/discography (no internet, no wikipedia, no entry in Encyclopedia Britannica, remember?) - and I got one I still keep. It was a cool little introduction to their music, but I had only two records, so the rest of the music happened in my imagination. It was all praise and great descriptions - except for Remote Luxury. Keywords: keyboards, weird experiments that didn't suit the music, and in spite of some "beautiful pop songs like A Month Of Sundays, 10.000 Miles and No Explanation" he still "didn't know what they wanted to tell me with Violet Town and Maybe These Boys". So. Well. So in my mind, there must have been some horrendous aberrations of songs, and I - a child easy to impress - was almost scared to check them out on record. If I could have one... because they were hard to find, except for some CD hiring shop, where I could get hold of Remote Luxury to make a copy on cassette. My tape had Rhyme on the other side, and i took it with me on a school trip to Paris (lots of time, little room in the bus).
So I listened to Remote Luxury while driving through a wonderfully ugly country called "Belgium", it was night, it was raining, and - I was totally amazed by a great opener, and, a little scared, Violet Town started playing.

Insistent, almost primitive drum beats and there was that creepy keyboard crawling into the song, two chords and a clockticking guitar rhythm. Very sparse, but strangely expansive and lugubrious, despite the childlike melody. Pure suspense. That sudden shift to a hellish minor empire in the chorus like a total eclipse of the sun, and the dissolving clouds again, letting a creepy sunlight back into the song. The contrast - verse vs. chorus is very Jekyll & Hyde. Plus a Bunuelish surreal vision of a suburb completely painted in violet with barking dogs and flying papers. I would have loved a Godley & Creme video clip; and I still haven't figured out how this quite simple song creates such an insistent, large vision, but maybe that's how my brain is wired.

Summary - no need to fear the synths of Remote Luxury. It's true, they're losing the rock, but the roll is very very heavy.

addendum - it's a great song to play on acoustic guitar, though it's a completely different beast then.

Constant In Opal

by timetunnel

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away... was a boy who had just been recommended a band called "The Church". "The Church, huh?", he thought. But he read a good review in a music magazine and as a result went to the local record store. Though being in a pretty small town they really had one copy of "Remote Luxury". Little Boy grabbed it, went to the listening desk and there it all started: "Constant In Opal" came on. The beginning swelling up like a siren. Are these guitars or keyboards, Little Boy wondered. He checked out a few songs, listened here and there and bought it, though not being 100% convinced.

So, yeah, Remote Luxury was my first Church album and Constant In Opal the first Church song ever for me. It sounds very 80s with its keyboards and the way it is mixed, and it's a huge departure from the darker Seance. The guitars are there but not as prominent as on Seance. Keyboard, drums and bass are very dominant here, and with its up-tempo, it becomes almost dancable. A very unsual thing for The Church. If you only know this album you'll definetely get a wrong picture of the band (I did!). I once owned a tape (which I forgot in a rented car several years ago) which contained The Church live in Milan 1988. The gig was broadcasted by radio and therefore made it to tape in good sound quality. Constant In Opal was one of the songs they played, and that was the point when I realized what a real killer song it is actually. The album version is good, but it's like you put a huge song into a small box which doesn't offer enough room for the song to unfold properly.