Yuku free message boards

FOR A MOMENT WE`RE STRANGERS

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-R´s for cartrips and the first one is OSAH-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 straight forward. 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 60´s 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.


Next song is ´Chrome Injury´. If it hasn´t materialized in 2 days then I will have to take a stab at it.

Yes, Chrome Injury is one of my faves from early Church. It´s so brutal and dang dang dang. The lines:
Chrome injury on his cheek
Three days strong, four day weak
have always felt like a keylines in the plot. It doesn´t make any sense (or does it?) but these lines are just whirling in my head when I think about this song. I see some kind of japanese funny sci-fi monster sinking in the sands with these crude facial injuries. There was a movie called Tetsuo that was some kind of arthouse hit in the 90´s that I somehow connect with this.

What is also cool that after Chrome Injury stops we are transported straight to the next song that more or less continues the same dang dang!

THE UNGUARDED MOMENT

First of all, I want to say that I feel unworthy to review this song. To me it´s just a song without any deeper meaning or story when I first heard it. Only a lot later than 1989, when I got this album in then hypermodern CD-format, did I even knew it had been some kind of hit.

So deep, deep without a meaning
I knew you'd find me leaving
Tell those friends with cameras for eyes
That their hands don't make me hang
They only make me feel like breathing
In an unguarded moment

A lot of the lyrics in Unguarded Moment feel almost throwaway stuff. Rifles for minds? Cameras for eyes? All of the songs in OSAH, while clearly executed by young band still show mature skills in songwriting. It´s not like there is a huge quantum leap from OSAH to TBC in terms of songwriting. SK was ready to produce songs that last and are still interesting enough to explore in 2009 and beyond. In his blog recently SK lambasted Oasis and Liam Callagher and dismissed Liam´s songwriting completely based on his first sketch of a song ´Little James´. I wanted to say that Liam has actually written many more songs later that are probably better. It´s not a big deal if your first songs are sketchy, Liam just got bigger exposure to his sketch than 99,99% of other starting songwriters. I don´t know as I don´t actually follow Oasis. I just feel that this song is the Oasis-moment for the band if that´s some funny connection. Anyway, SK is in a position where he doesn´t actually need to shame anything he has done in the past and even OSAH is quality stuff. The Unguarded Moment, however, feels a bit sketchy and most of the lines are just lines that doesn´t connect that brilliantly. There is also the line "So deep, deep without a meaning" that strangely enough is brilliant and goes on to define the whole album and even large part of the band´s career.

It´s just that it´s a great simple rock song that appeals to many people. It was written and done faster than others (?) and it then lacks the perhaps disturbing intellectual sheen that the other songs have. This is The Church stripped bare of most of it´s complexities, while they still do exist under the surface. Many great songs have been done this way, just to fill a void in the album. Take a simple riff and sing some fast daa-daa on top of it. Some of them end up as hits, some go to b-sides. This is the ´Paranoid´of the band. Luckily it was not the last big hit they did. If it had been the last hit then the image of the band would have been considerably different than what it is now.

Can somebody answer what is the reason why James Brown- saxplayer Maceo Parker is credited as a songwriter? It must be somewhere but I didn´t find that info.

Oh, that makes a lot more sense. After I had ripped the CD in WMP it said in composer column Maceo Parker/Steve Kilbey, maybe it was typed in the credits originally by some joker, and I have been searching if there is some part of the song that has lifted something from some funky Maceo-tune. Apparently it has all been in vain!

There is no need to have so many words. It´s just the excitement of starting it. Later I will probably be more economical with the amount of words.

I also feel that the 4 first songs form a unified group in the beginning of the album. Chug chug bang bang, take no prisoners kind of attitude. Although Bel-Air was chosen here as the best song of OSAH it´s still a bit of a letdown in the context of the album. After the 4 first songs I´m ready for some more chug but after the metallic bang it feels a bit twee. Of course every rock album needs quiet moments too but it´s sort of too pretty and that´s why it has fallen off my radar usually when I listen to OSAH. Next song ´Is this where you live?´ despite it´s slow opening fits quite perfectly to the feel of the album.

I can´t be wordy or exploring this song properly as much as it needs, so if you want to write more and better about it then go ahead.

"Branching off, the road winds east
Deluxe locations just near completion
Come dine with wine and oyster feast
The pearls are real, have one for free
They're washed up by the foam-waved sea"

It´s funny to see how that was written waaaay back in 1980 or even earlier but those themes surface over and over again in Steve´s blog. Those lines are something that I could imagine reading today in the blog and I probably have seen something similar there. Standing in awe looking at all the beautiful things world has to offer. The wonders of nature and life and enjoying them like there is no tomorrow. Also there is the almost constant undercurrent of guilt to enjoy it or the envy of the rich. These themes pop up so often in the stream of thoughts in the blog too. Those lines flow from there like from a fountain and it´s not your usual new wave lyrics. How many artists you could imagine doing this kind of lyrics on top of this music? Even at early age Steve is an old sage trapped inside a body of a new wave rocker. This feels very wordy song and I feel that the lyrics are important here.

This song reminds me a lot of ´Not What You Say´ from the new Painkiller album. Long without feeling too long. Oh, and minus the whale noises or whatever.

I was playing OSAH at work. There was also these two younger guys and they started to laugh at it. "This is 80´s! Hah haa! What sounds!" As I´m so deep in to the world of Church I can´t hear that stuff. I listen to it probably in another way. When we came to Fighter Pilot another one became kinda excited. "Hey this is the devils notes (Tritone) ! Then he became this story how it was played by Paganini and it was forbidden to play that melody in medieval times. I learned something new. Year later I happened to play it randomly and he was present there and started the same story. Anyway, I respected his knowledge of music. One of his paychecks he spended on a sitar...that tells a lot. I learned never to play OSAH or this song again if he is present. Raw energy song, kinda like basic OSAH style song. Not the best nor the worst.

First I must say about Tritone is that it was just something that the sitarman told me. His version of the stuff no matter how wrong it was. I always imagine him somewhere sitting on a Pacific Ocean cloud playing Fighter Pilot with his sitar. These songs are filled with some strange memories and associations. Maybe because the lyrics are adjustable to many moods and mindsets, many of them having absolutely nothing in common with my own life.

It´s like Don´t Open The Door was left out ? Acoustic guitar strumming, slow rhythym section, Steve sounds sleepy and deep. Piano starts and somewhere in the background organ weaves a Procol Harum-ish melancholic web. There is some Elton John-vibes too in here too, if I knew what Elton is all about. When everything feels complete the slide guitar starts to squeeze some extra emotion at 2:06. During the last lines when Steve sings ...tonight...tonight...the wiuu-wiuu-wiuu slide squeezes are just a tad too much but all in all it has some charm and I´m not tired to listen it again a couple of times. After all the chug chug of the album it´s a real conventional album closer to show the sensitive side of the band. The kinda song a band would end with their debut album and maybe get the lighters out at a gig. It feels oddly conventional in many ways. This is The Church after all.

During one game user Jesuskrishna made a joke that it was good that Steve never followed his advice of not opening the door to strangers and now we have "Just For You"! That was so hilarious.

Rest of the b-sides etc. are: Sisters, Too Fast For You, In A Heartbeat, Fraulein, You´ve got to go, Busdriver. Choose any one of those.

What you think if these reviews are made in to one real blog in blogspot or wordpress? Would it be okay for you to have your reviews there? I can copy/paste them there or you can do it on your own if you have accounts in those.

Any snappy name suggestions for the blog?