A Different Tale about Rock

I wrote this story about The Hypnogogue. You may well recognise its elements in the music … or not. To me it feels like a possible story of what The Church could be about. The Hypnogogue seems like a culmination, a synthesis of some kind, of the work of The Church, of an expressive form of rock spirituality, of rock tout court, a little rock music history or a reflection on music creation. It’s a reset, a rethink, a restart or an apotheosis.

The Parable of The Hypnogogue or The Passion according to Steve Kilbey and his Church

The rhetorics of rock have been amply demonstrated by The Church over many years now. Their latest album – as if in the form of a postmodern gospel – reflects on the state of their art after a well-documented journey of strive, passion, accomplishment, suffering, errancy, doubt, perseverance, harmony, struggle, treason and dedication. The lyrical narrative is as tangled and varied as the instrumental intricacies, interplays and singularities. In his lyrics Steve Kilbey holds monologues with his own music persona, introduces dialogues based on conjectures, beliefs, fabulations and projections, narrates disputes which seem to imitate the tension between good and bad, virtue and vice, heaven and earth, dream and reality, all in an attempt to contemplate what it means to be a music artist. An intriguing ride instigated and led by the multiple personalities of these musicians be they guitar-men, drummer or keyboardist.

This is going to sound really silly and probably also like a porky pie I just made up, but it happened for real. A couple of nights ago during a state of being half-awake/half-asleep, this sentence formed in my head and it came to me again at several more reprises during the night, as if it wanted to make sure I wouldn’t forget about it. It said: “The Church for the first time have acquired the status of being a religion”. This morning, all of a sudden I remembered the phrase and I smiled about it. It seemed somewhat overly dramatic and exaggerated and even beside the point.
And then remembering some of the lyrics, the idea whisked its way through my mind. The opening song’s title Ascendence only corroborated the sleep-induced words that had shaped in my dreamlike mind. “Your ascension is assured – Your ascension your reward”. Steve Kilbey’s passion for rock in all its aspects has never been a secret. Music is his way of being. The Hypnogogue listens as a salute and an offering to some of the past geniuses of rock and pop through some sort of Freudian reinterpretation of a bad dream in which the gift and aptitude of musical creation have faded out. The nightmare of imagining a world without the prospect of musical history continuing through natural filiations of an earthly spirit of musicianship. The Hypnogogue’s mind reads as an intricate and complicated discourse of instruments and voices; the “I’s” and “You’s” in the lyrics pose in a dialogue of a superior creature addressing some sort of subordinate, with their roles continuously interchanging. The “I” and “you” protagonists in the narrative are drenched in an almost sacred and archetypal aura – nothing really new in the way Steve Kilbey uses these pronouns though – but somehow in this latest album the halo got more pronounced. Together with the guitars, drums and keyboard sounds, the words seem to lay bare the conditions for a different spirituality… the spirituality of rock.

Over several decades Steve Kilbey created a space, a community, to be and to listen. He rightfully called it a “Church”. The ease with which he continues to proffer his music and words is truly exceptional and the way he has gathered the perfect companions to deliver the task at hand is equally unique. Instrumentalists and vocalists communicating a sound of worship in a most subtle way. Because it’s water clear that sometime during his early life, Steve Kilbey must have taken an oath and he vowed to be in the service of the greater good of music. Listening to all those twentieth-century boys from the British Isles, he must have felt an almost moral obligation to spread the word and continue in their footsteps. Music brings forth godlike heroes and some of them have found a way to invest rock music with an inner dimension that borders on reverence and ardor. The Hypnogogue is testimony to that spirit of rock creation.

“Walk on through the brambles and the briars”, the lyrical text of this parable of creation is full of biblical allusions. The images of thorn-like obstacles are spread out over the reflective observance of the thirteen rock rituals which are performed by the band with utter conscientiousness. The ceremonial that binds the musicians together is as strict as it is revelatory. They all understood perfectly what it means to be an acting priest in this music congregation in veneration of the same gods. Beautiful roots like an English rose.
The threatening nightmare of a paradise of creative musicianship for ever lost, has prompted this five-men band to set the laws of rock in stone for generations to come with a proper performance of musical rites. And at the same time it is a tribute to all great rock geniuses that paved the way. Because that’s what this Church is doing: they give back to those rock and pop gods what is owed them. In Steve’s wonderful diction with a posh English accent and an airy Australian wring to it, “Flickering Lights” is as beatifying a song the band has ever created. And the regular metrical lines – ever pushed forward – of the title song, the virtually automated concatenation of sounds, their fluency as they take on this intrepid battle to defy the enemy lying in wait to rob them of their freedom is nothing less than a tour de force of musical ingenuity. It’s a visionary song of musical resilience that will never be defeated and broken or forced into the annihilation of the human spirit of creation. The song is a perfect circle that will never cease to be.

In “Thorn” a prophet is speaking once more. Steve Kilbey is embodying the persona of a representative of some higher being who holds the reins firmly and tightly. The greed and the wants of a “you” – a mere mortal “everyone” – in what once was a paradise, are being ridiculed. But a possibility of redemption is on its way. Indeed, central to Kilbey’s allegorical story of creating music, is the concept of original sin and the drive of human desire and wants. Somehow he intuits that an authentic and bona fide obsession with musical creation lies somewhere in the intersection of desire, pleasure, vanity and wanting ever more, and the concurring feeling of guilt, fear and repent and the latter’s aftertaste of humility and need for contemplation and reflection. A subtle balance, hard to achieve, that makes for a very fascinating journey. An equilibrium that The Church as a band have always strived for. Albert Ross – “Pretty as sin” (a stunner of an opening line!) – and Thorn are sublime expressions of these extremes. With humour, wit, perspicacity and wisdom Steve Kilbey is playing the role of a godlike creature who nonchalantly announces the return of Eden sometime soon. So that the whole story of sin, remorse and guilt can finally, once and for all time, be stopped, by the women in the welcoming land of the Tigris and the Euphrates. “And I want to send a shout-out to all the ladies. – I’m saying Eden it’s coming back soon.” This surely must be the surprisingly refreshing pinnacle of this masterpiece that is The Hypnogogue. In the languishing rhythm of the bathing ladies … Some kind of resetting the scene! The moment when John the Baptist and Mack the Knife – dressed in white and black respectively – make an appearance in an echoing reverb of the past of good and bad, is one of those Church flashes of the brightest insight to which they seem to have the monopoly in rock.
The prescient “These Coming Days” – with the drums picking up the same idle rhythm of the bathing women – pursues the train of thought of “Thorn”: “And it happens again. -The flying and the fallen”. “You can smell the future”.
The lyrics of “Succulent” – an irresistible temptation as juicy as the fruit of Eden – express an astonishment about a creation, which might even be reinterpreted as Steve Kilbey’s own amazement at how fabulous the music of this band sounds once more; the album is full of these self-referential ponderings of both the lyricist and the musicians on their own art and the path they have travelled. The Hypnogogue suggests a rewriting of the conditions of artistic creation, which eventually might falter and might only lead up to an acceptance of what has always been. But who knows what will be…?

Is there another way, another chance for something different? A new Eden of creation? A garden all in bloom. The Church ask fundamental questions. Their music harbours all the implications of those questions and more. It simply continues the tale of the walrus and the carpenter. As if time had no impact on this Church.

Joke Roelandt, March 2023