Don't Look Back

by chrome3d

I had a theory that The Blurred Crusade is a theme album and all the songs follow a "masterplan" that describes a story of a crusader although single songs follow the story only in a very loose fashion if at all. It was just an impression I got and I don't want to seek same kind of meanings and plots from other albums. Seance as a theme album about a seance? Maybe not. Anyway, I have to continue on my chosen path here.

Just For You - years have passed and certain ideas have changed but I did it just for you Jesus, God or higher force. The crusader has settled for his life and found his place and joy of life.
A Fire Burns - the blurred part of a crusade. I would like to see this part as a hallucinatory sequence seen during recovery from battle or sickness. There are, however, more simpler elements too. The same fire that started his journey is still inside him and he has found his heart but lost his way. "Life is worth another stay" a better afterlife as a reward for this one spent on a crusade?
To Be In Your Eyes - I did all this to be in your eyes. Simple.
You Took - You took a piece of my heart. That's what a crusade does. The plot practically writes itself as I now know who is the You of 4 of the titles. The instrumental part I would like to see as the epic sea journey back home.
Don't Look Back - After coming home there is no looking back. What was there is not here. A serene wisdom has been found. Keep on walking back home.

The song closes in a typical fashion ...and don't look back here again, like an album should close. It's 2:00 of simple ( I like to use this word here as opposed to some other songs) pleasure. The kinda song that leaves you with a warm smile on the face perhaps wanting some more. The strumming guitars and the just gorgeous slide guitar lead the song. The high quality of the album is maintained here as in all of the other songs. This is just as thought out and planned as the other "bigger" songs. During the reviews of this album I have fallen in love again with this album. It has a strong emotional centre and it moves back and forth between simple and layered. It is warm and intimate yet it has grand visions. It gives food for thought just as well as it did 27 years ago. Maybe later I will have different kind of vision about it. That's one of the charms about it, there may be concepts but they never fully reveal themselves.

You Took

by fandorin

You Took

You…

Took…

At the end of the crusade, we will have to fight a monstrosity unseen before. There it is. You Took. Song title quite heavy on the “o”’s and on duration. The final battle of the epic The Blurred Crusade. Oh wait, did I say “epic”? The word “epic” when applied to pop music, usually sucks. It’s a knee jerk reaction to anything over 6:59, when you’re too lazy to actually think about that huge chunk of music. Magician among the spirits has nothing epic at all, it’s long and sprawling, but in the end, things are the same. It’s composed silence and static, it’s more architecture than journey. “Epic” is stuck to anything long and sprawling. In this case, though, it’s a nice description, because there so much to tell.

I very much believe there are hidden concepts behind some Church albums, maybe in that random blurred realm of unconsciousness. Maybe the concepts emanate from the strength and stubborn individuality of the song material, like connecting dots, maybe everyone sees a different beast in the music. That’s what I love about The Church – Starfish’s veiled, blurred travel theme, Priest’s surreal historical scapes between modern angst and Antikythera, and earlier, The Blurred Crusade’s telling of, yes, an epic, without a hero, without the invocation of the muse, but with a subliminal storyline, from the microcosmic miniatures to the vast musical battle of You Took. There are vague heroic deeds, travels, quests, but you can never really grab it. It renews the cheesy genre of concept album by hiding the concept box in a deep forest and throwing away the keys. But in fact - like in a big-picture classical work, there are a lot of cross connections going on while on the Crusade. Certain guitar figurations and rhythmizations from An Interlude return in You Took.

Man, they’ve must have been proud when they finally had hammered You Took on tape. Where does it all come from? It is all so uneighties. That wonderful, organic, clean-not-sterile sound. The spot-on drum crashes. The mechanical exactness and the restrained guitar orgies. lI can’t but summon again the german deities of Neu! here. Go and buy Neu! ’75 if you can, give it a listen an compare You Took and Seeland. Or listen to Seeland here...and you know where certain elements of Is This Where You Live and You Took come from, right, made in Germany...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awNiwKoyoR8 – Seeland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiMQ5r5y78g - Isi

However, the clockticking reason of Neu! is expanded with huge guitar sounds, heavier drumming and the first twin guitar battles hinting at the dissolution of the lead/rhythm concept. The rhythm is the lead, and the lead is the rhythm. Everything is just – music, metrum, beat and melody, timbre, shades. I always thought Heyday was a huge leap in sound and production, but it was just a return to where they had stopped on The Blurred Crusade.

The floating bass harmonics (isn’t that a gorgeous bass sound?) of the beginning, the mighty drum sounds, the beginning octave riff, the two simple chords...there’s a song slowly forming from fragments and motifs, the particles are forming atoms, the atoms forming molecules, and we almost don’t realize we’re already in medias res when Peter’s first solo melody cuts the air. The genius plot twist of the “evil” Gilmour-meets-Morricone guitar melody, the vast build-up and – stumble – the song comes to a halt, with the menacing bass throb hovering in the air. “You took a piece of my heart, and I don’t know why” – This sounds so trivial, but still powerful and earnest. I won’t describe the rest, how they build guitar towers, the peal of bells in the “duelling guitars” section, as if two belfries are fighting each other on a desert plain, the distorted singing in the end, how that simple la la melody from the beginning grows tentacles and claws, until we all fall through a black hole and roam the land like disoriented knights after the battle...I love that aural illusion of speed changes, but the whole song has the same speed, it's just getting denser and denser, an illusionary tempo change.

Formally, it follows quite exactly the baroque form of a rondo, with a principal theme alternating with several contrasting themes and couplets, sometimes freely, sometimes related to the principal exposition.

The percussion complexity and the perseverating open-string dissonant, "impressionist" seventh chord drone instead of an affirmative return to the main key shows something they will try ten years later, on Priest=Aura. Listen to the outro, almost disappearing in silence, but there is still so much going on. It's very very uncommon in rock music to end your song on an "open" chord like that, crying for a harmonic solution that never arrives, like a little machine spinning on madly forever until we get a faux-happy end with Don't Look Back.

All in all, You Took is a fucking awesome song. Yes, it's an epic. The Blurred Crusade is the Beowulf of Australian Psychedelic Rock. And Kilbey wrote it almost on his own (though Koppes explained he did a lot of arrangement work in the early days, it's him on the beautiful glassy piano and glockenspiel interludes). Someone explain the video to me.

To Be In Your Eyes

It's quite fitting that the song that follows A Fire Burns is one of the most simple and easily understandable songs of the album. When the previous song didn't make much sense even at the 50th glance then it's good to have an intimate and warm story about something that all of us have done. Dreaming in the night before sleep, listening to the sounds of night, trying to catch some sleep, contemplating the previous day, thinking about the future. Being alone with your thoughts, in need of a person inside you to be capable to do so many things. To Be In Your Eyes is like a blues song in a way that only The Church can do. It's almost unnecessary to say that I want my sad reflection to go drifting through the skies as the feeling of the song tells it so convincingly already.

In all its simplicity and ability to create a mood this is one of the greatest songs in this album. It's not a song that has a chance to be any kind of hit or a well known classic. If melancholic introspective quiet moods are something for you (and as a friend of the music of The Church this is more than likely) then this is the song from this album that you will cherish forever. I have done a lot of favourable reviews from the songs of The Blurred Crusade and it's no wonder considering the time I have spent with it ever since I found it on vinyl in the late 80es. If I had to choose the best two songs of this album, then it would be Just For You from the pop songs and this one from the other quiet ones. Is this enough said of this song? I don't know, it somehow always feels not enough.

A fire burns 2

by chrome3d

After the mostly gentle songs of the beginning of the album we are now promised some serious and more straight forward rock, slightly more in the style of previous album Of Skins and Heart. It's perhaps the track that mostly resembles something that was spawned in the sessions for Of Skins And Heart. Even the title of the song could have been more at home in the track list of Of Skins and Heart. After the spunky first two verses the song comes to the chorus and the song changes gears to more dream pop-style treatment. Later on in the song there are guitars that remind me of mandolins, an instrument that they will use more prominently in later songs. The song turns in to more melancholic and introspective than what was first promised.

Lyrically I can't get much out of the song. Lyrics here feel more like just words that give something to sing to.

A fire burns inside me
The snow still falls in flakes
The reins around a horse's throat
Turn into a lake
And people so familiar
Their words are in my mind
A fire burns inside me
Dancing cool and blind

reins around horse's throat turn into a lake? I try to extract some meaning from this song but if it's there then it's hard hidden. This is also one of those songs that I can't fit in to my "bigger picture" of Blurred Crusade as a theme album of a crusader. Maybe it's this song's task to be one of those blurred songs, to make the story take another turn to something else? I have to think about it more but that's one of the good points of The Church songs: the meaning can open up after years of listening...sometimes only to be closed again like a veil of mystery shortly afterwards.

A Fire Burns

by fandorin

The Blurred Crusade shows a band totally in control of itself, as well as a stubborn individuality. They could have become Australia's rock poster boys, instead, we find those mysterious knights and the little bird. We could have found a story, but with a strangeness reminding me of David Lynch's later movies, they are veiling, blurring it. Everything seems in its place, everything follows a certain logic. The Blurred Crusade is an album of incredible coherence. If you read Chrome3d's historical crusade interpretation before, everything seems to hint at a concept album. But we can look at every page, we know all is tightly linked together, but we don't see the plans, like a pleasant book we won't ever understand.

A Fire Burns is the hardest rocking song on Crusade, and maybe the only one showing a little rock n roll swagger among the other nine chamber rock masterpieces. I never really cared too much for it, but in the context of the album, it just has to be there, just as Almost With You's nylon string solo is compellingly logical. I know, it's all in my mind, just as that coloured mess painted by Monet melts into gardens, lakes and fields with a few steps distance. A Fire Burns is a close cousin of Life Speeds Up, it's almost as if they had taken apart and reassembled it. Compare the drum grooves and guitar hooks. Even at its heaviest, it's still crystal clear chamber music to me. The new quality lies in Crusade's very special transparence. Every instrumental track shines with gorgeous clarity, every track lies next to each other like rubies in a crown, still forming one big whole.

After the release of R.E.M.'s Automatic for the people, we had the beautiful genre name of Chamber Pop. Associated with autumnal misanthropy, melancholy and acoustic orchestration. What I am seeing, even in A Fire Burns, is chamber music as well. Progressive chamber rock. We are far from the huge abysses of Priest=Aura, far from the vitriolic space rock of latter days, but in a very sober state of early, masterly perfection. This is what I meant before, after the debut, The Church were fully mature, going into a different direction with every record. Ha, that's record company happiness, an adult band doing whatever they think has to be done with every record. As they say on their myspace site, they sound incredibly like themselves. Here, they opted for sped-up growing up, mystery, clarity and a certain haze of thematic darkness. I close my eyes and try to associate The Church with colours....dark, black, amber, with oriental red textures moving under the surface. I listen to the music, with ears as wide open as possible and I can't nail down where the darkness comes from.

Just now, 26 years after the release and 16 years after purchase, I start to admire the gesamtkunstwerk of The Blurred Crusade.

Just For You

Strumming acoustic guitar, knock knock, "Oh wait there" and the song just bursts in to the room. Steve sings in a slightly monotone way over the chirpy jangle and it feels like heaven. At the 2 minute mark starts an airy period that builds and builds and then the guitar solo starts to play with the strings of my heart. At the 4 minute mark a new jangle part just builds and builds to the beautiful mountain tops of pure pop bliss. It’s not the best pop tune ever but it feels just about the best for me. I don’t know how many times I can or dare to say that I love this song. It’s so easy to love this song. Who doesn’t? Hands up there all you black hearted doomsday wishers who think this song is total sugar coated bollocks. Yes, you people have no heart. Open the door, see the sun, smell the fresh winds, fall in love with the world, hug the strangers and all that. Driving a car can never be better than when I listen to this song. No matter what kind of rusty box I’m driving, it feels like a smoothest ride in a luxury BMW. Israel bombing Gaza and all other hideous atrocities of the world are faaaar away. World is a beautiful place and the soundtrack to all those beautiful things is right here. Just for you, baby.

I swear not to make edits on this one, baybeeee!

Secret Corners

Is it possible to view The Blurred Crusade as a loose theme album about...indeed, a crusade? Why not? The odd experiments and achievements of 70’s prog are not far behind, it’s 1982 after all. The album is very much done for the vinyl in two parts and both sides are almost identical: 3 relatively straight popsongs, a huge epic and a small song in the end = straight 10 song pop album. So where is the prog theme then? Here is how I see it as a loose plotline above the songs themselves:

Almost With You - Excitement of going to a journey of a crusade. "Who are you trying to get in touch with?". "Is this the taste of victory?" I’m almost with you, Jesus.
When You Were Mine - Journey to holy land by sea. Men drown in a storm. Nope, it’s not victory.
Field Of Mars - Remembering all those who were left behind in the journey of previous song.
An Interlude - An epic first battle. How to become a master swordsman or guitar player. Epic battle mostly instrumentally.
Secret Corners - Small song where the main character thinks about his relationship with Jesus. The battle has been a test of faith and there has to be some introspection and soul searching. "who is this child, who is this man?". Crusader knows that Jesus will be waiting him. "Run to the secret corners, I’ll still be waiting" Jesus says to him.

I’m not a deeply religious person. It can just be interpreted that way as the lyrics are rich in religious images. In that sense this song is as important in the main storyline as all the other songs. In all adventure movies the hero has to search his motives and pause for a moment before the next action piece.

What about the song Secret Corners? It’s so sweet and short. In 1:46 it’s the first miniature gem of the band. Nightflower, Old Flame, Don’t Look Back...It builds to the first chorus, which is sung only once and then tum-tum-tum and it’s over before you know it. It’s such a nice cliffhanger for the next side that you have to wait as you flip the side of the vinyl. Originally I felt that it was half developed but when viewed as a cliffhanger, or end of chapter 1, it makes a lot more sense. Even though it’s short it’s as essential in this side as any of the other songs.

How will the crusade develop in the second half? That’s what I will review in Don’t Look Back.

An Interlude

by Heyday2day

Another fine song that holds its place well. From the dream pop of Almost With You, the frenetic, but controlled swirl of When You Were Mine, the melancholic, yet somewhat hopeful Field Of Mars to An Interlude. To my ears, this song carries the unique characteristics of the three previous tracks, yet the band does it in a way that makes the sum greater than the parts. Because of that, I have always seen this track as ambitious, with wonderful energy and superb musicianship. Lyrically, beyond the first verse, I'm not really sure what Kilbey is on about. I know what it means to me but that hardly qualifies. The first line of each verse is double tracked with a slight delay. Kilbey's voice on top with a female voice slightly off center- underneath . This little trick gets me every time, it lends weight to the first line of all three verses. I also really dig how the female voice only speaks her line and stops there. The past tense is just Kilbey......."she said", "she smiled", "she laughed". This lends weight to not only what she is saying but also how he feels about it. Before the first big break between the 2nd and 3rd verses, we have classic early Church. Guitars each playing their own melodies, wrapping in with each other, creating layers of notes. Ploog's playing is subdued, never really overshadowing the textures being created by Willson-Piper and Koppes. After the second verse, the tempo changes a little, ringing notes become strummed chords, Ploogs up front now and Koppes picks out a fitting for the mood solo. A little aside, one of the many things I love about the Church is that it is always a band thing and not a me thing, service to the song is the top priority. Koppes does this and the tempo falls back into the shades again and the third verse is sung. The last line of "an interlude for the busy staff" immediately takes us into the next tempo change. Again, everything fits, from the chop chop chords at the 3 minute mark to the stinging lead lines and running hi-hat fading out.

Field Of Mars

by chrome3d

All songs on The Blurred Crusade are written by Kilbey except 3: Field Of Mars, An Interlude and You Took. It's easy to see why the last two songs are credited to the whole band as they rely on instrumental parts and jamming so heavily. Field of Mars however is a "real" and "proper" song. How much of it is actually Marty's is not known. Some of the lyrics are pure Marty featuring many images that show up in his later songs:

"Only more sad clouds where autumn winds will blow"

There are also many symbols that are frequently seen in Steve's lyrics:

"And I have to leave, but I never seem to go" (churchy line if any!)
"Grief won't last in the departing cars" (cars show up once again)

Is it really important who wrote what? Not really as it's still a great song and it fills it's place in the album very fittingly. I don't mind the fact that there is 1 or 2 songs sung by someone else in a The Church and there is no big difference in this song related to the other songs. In the times when I heard them first it just added more mysterious light to those songs. I remember seeing some story where Steve said that it was personal text and written based on partially true story and that is why Marty sings it. It follows storywise the same deadly line as the previous songs:
Sisters: old woman remembering her dead sister
Almost With You: death of a soldier (? in my view)
When You Were Mine: more mysterious one but there is drowning and she is long gone
Field Of Mars: tears and loss are felt in a cemetery under the sad autumn clouds

Musically it paints a calm and pastoral landscape where the bells of guitars chime far away as the singer walks through the cemetery. I don't know if there are tubular bells in the background too as there is in You Took, but it somehow feels to me that they are there even if they are not. Sometimes when I have walked in cemeteries I think of this song as it captures that feeling so perfectly. It could be silent there but the bells in the distance press play with this song. Although the painting of the graveyard mood is a bit heavy sometimes it still shows the mastery of the band to create atmospheres.

Although in one game in hotelwomb.com Field Of Mars was chosen as the first song to be dropped from this album, it's still beautiful and great song to me and fully deserves its spot in this album. I can't love this album more as it's "weakest links" are still superb stuff in almost every way. In my mind The Blurred Crusade is solid from top to bottom. To me at least.

When You Were Mine 2

by fandorin

I must butt in here with another little quick glance, as When You Were Mine is my favourite song on The Blurred Crusade. When I learned about The Church in 1990, I was 13, and you know, money was scarce and hard to get. We had that huge record store in our town, and they even had something to file The Church under. I was amazed how many records they had out...and I loved to go there after piano lessons to listen to records I couldn't afford. A few times I listened to Crusade via headphones and I was amazed how different Kilbey's voice sounded then... I didn't buy it until next year, when I was working. However, I could wait in these days and there was no way to find something on the internet, as it was 1990. Music was a hard to find, big mystery.

I remember listening to Almost With You for the first time, and though I still love the song to bits, it was so bloody obvious. A song like Almost With You just had to be there. It has some strong, inherent logic, that, if a 15th century scientist would have had a world formula, Almost With You would have been the logical result. I was surprised by its solemn beauty, but I wasn't surprised by its existence.

What surprised me was When You Were Mine. I just couldnt have foreseen this song, neither its loooong intro section, nor the AMAZING little percussion bits going on beyond the guitars in the intro section, nor its transcendence of the olde chugge, neither the offbeat "Plenty of islands between now and then" section.

It's not 60es, not 70es, not 80es. today, i understand there could be reflections of Neu!'s german angular robotic-while-alive pulsating Hallogalloisms. Yep, if you associate Kraut with weird drugged infinite guitar wankery, check out clean-but-mad Neu! ... but The Church filled the cold brooklets of Neu!'s ideas with a throbbing passion that became something new/neu in the end. This is punk without the poses, it's druggy without losing conscience and straight without being predictable. Just an early, stubbornly individual song, one of the first transcending the rock instrumentation, becoming something you could board, and it'd fly you somewhere...

When You Were Mine

by Hanani

I guess I can't speak for Steve Kilbey here because i've never done the seance thing and lots of Steve's songs on this album seem to reference that. but the hell with that -- I love this music! Is this dated? I dunno, couldn't tell you. This is Tantalized, this is Hotel Womb, and you know that this is a great concert song because this is theatrics, building, building, exploding!

"Explode on the bridge, Peter and Marty, bring it up a level and make it sexy!" <-- hehe.

Because, to me, this music is the recollection becoming that clearer, clearer, that much clearer, when you were mine. it was a rush, then, as it is now, when you were mine. a nice throbbing bass, mind you, hissing noises, the feedback roaring and the flurry of notes back to the major key. good stuff all around, and quite a honor to dig back and find this, keeping in mind that the US label (Chrysalis?) dropped them after the first album, I wouldn't see or hear from the church again until I was 15/16 when heyday was released. Before the explosion of starfish and the Arista reissues, I was able to find this album, and it still sounded up to snuff 3-4 years later. Now, more than 20 years (!!!) later, I can still dig this. Good rock and intrigue.

a nice, random post on a great song. the song deserves better, but someone else can paint over my feeble sketches.

Almost With You

Almost With You is one of the true classic openers of The Church albums. It sucks me right in to the mood of the album. It has drive and speed but the melancholic blues shades layered on top of it make it a song that can be appreciated in many moods quite perfectly. It's a quality that I often seek, being able to project many moods on a song.

The lyrics of the song are enigmatic as ever. More like painting a canvas with nostalgic sepia-shades. The feeling of loneliness, longing and the passing of time are there, not necessarily said, merely hinted at. Every line, at least in my mind, ends with an image of something out of reach and long gone.
...before our time
...forgotten and gone
...not far behind
still there is a sense of uplifting euphoria. The happiness of being alive. Waiting for good great things in the future. Or is there? Is it a song about a dead man who died in a war and the singer is coming to his funeral? Sometimes I see it so.

Musically it feels so simple but it's only surface. Originally long time ago I was a bit surprised that this song was so simple as their other material was not so. The drums drive the song with their slightly boxy sound and the speed changes make me smile. The guitars are layered on top of it like a jangly (this term will be used a lot from now on) string of pearls and it all culminates to the wonderful Peter Koppes solo with his warm and absolutely lovable spanish guitar. If I had to choose one solo from their discography that I love it could be this. It's unlike others and it fits the atmosphere of the song so perfectly.