Review Summary: Warm (beer + love + piss)
Despite a smattering of blood and not-so-distant relatives living there, I have never visited Australia. This is a shame and I hope to change it someday; closest I’ve come was an unfortunate Skype experiment putting Japanese elementary schoolkids in front of real life realtime Aussie English. Their Aussie counterparts failed to provide a clear explanation for time, seasonal differences, or how to parse anything within the hue of their accents; our Japanese charges mega-failed to spill the tea on the
Demon Slayer manga they’d brought for show-and-tell - but I digress! I find it easy to dream about Australia, enough to sustain a full fifteen seconds’ worth of my alternative life as the Aussie waster whose warmhearted uncomplicated way of life holds all the answers for my 2022 neurotic stewage. My bucket list for this goes as follows:
・Drinking mediocre but extremely perfect beer with my arse planted on the warm bonnet of someone else’s car on top of the hill while the sun sets orangely and beauteously enough that I can forget that it is Christmas and that I have no career prospects.
・Falling in love with the wrong girl and taking advantage of the country’s natural abundance of directionless dusty-maybe-humid dust tracks to indulge my subsequent despondency to the point of the most eligible tanned calves on the continent.
・Falling in love with - maybe - the right girl and celebrating the understanding that this would be the best and most significant thing ever to happen to me with the most bittersweet bottle of unnecessarily imported red plonk in all of whichever ***ty creek.
・Telling my parents I love them as we find ourselves mutually speckled with falling nectar from a leaky goonsack midway through a swirly, spinny round of the country’s premier drinking game.
So, yes, I really like, and occasionally definitely love, The Church’s third and apparently
deeply underappreciated record
Seance, partially because many of its jangle x neo-psych songs are certified dreamdust, but mainly because it ties in to all my half-baked fantastical notions of Australia-in-another-life so well that I can practically smell the body odour and undercooked meat emanating from umpteen figments of my imagination. In keeping with those same notions, it’s also full of a fair bit of vacuous fluff that I don’t really know what to do with (you got me, “Travel By Thought” and “Now I Wonder Why”), but this is okay because there is an understanding. There is an image. An image speaks a thousand words. A song can contain any number of images. Why hunt for words for songs when you already have their image(s)? All is cool - and so we have “Disappear”, a beautiful song with lyrics I have shall never pay attention to because it Vibe so perfectly evokes everything being Cool in spite of sunlight and hormone levels that are somehow out of sync with one another (which way I cannot tell). If the blues set in and upset the cool, I shall listen to “It's No Reason” and consider shedding daydreamy airheaded tears (but, like, probably not deliver on this). If I ever start to question my existence, then “Electric Lash” will bring me back to a fantasy of Australian versions of my folks in a summery swoony prelude to my existence back in 19XX. Yes. Perfect!
As we were saying
Seance could hardly be better placed as far as its station in the Church’s discog goes: our noble foursome had brought their songcraft down to earth from
The Blurred Crusade’s occasionally stuffy dreamscapes, and while they were still down for a good daydream, there’s a hint of something a little more sunburnt and dirt-caked than their clean-as-could-be follow-up
Heyday would be prepared to platform. Does this amount to historical significance! Of course - well, like, not really at all,
but better still, it means you should and shall listen to it. Don’t let your dreams be dreams - find your own spirit of Australia todayoh *** snap,
that explaints the album tit
