The Realm of a Voice and a Guitar: Reflections upon Discovering the music of The Church

A Postmodern Story of Creation

The song’s poet is the singer. It all starts off with a voice in a white shimmering darkness. A voice lending itself to language, to the intuited secret of the word. Music and words. I like it when they get together. Especially in the free, barely regulated way they do in the postmodern, fragmented form of the classical Lied, i.e. as in a contemporary pop or rock song.

I only knew their “Under the Milky Way”. Even in the destituteness and emptiness of a loveless world, a song still lingers over its surface. The singer’s word endures, stays with the music with which it forms the strangest of alliances. The way the words fall into the music is always something of a mystery –  something quite peculiar – never more so than with this band of The Church of man who want to connect – so it would seem – the skies above, to the earth beneath through the spirited medium of a little muscle, the tongue, that reaches for and opens the cavernous depths of language.

The words need an escort though, something which moves all things along and makes way for everything, something that in all the force of its presence runs far ahead and allows the mind to roam freely, without reins, the muse of all muses: music. The Words and Music of The Church have always formed the most sacred of alliances. Their kingdom is a music of vastness and expanse, guitars that chime towards celestial eternity and drum rhythms that aim for order, rest, command, rapture and ritual… and for anything earthbound… in an overwhelming, twilight world of mystical chaos.

The voice of Steve Kilbey has a grain so delicate, with the slightest, guttural creak, allowing it to permeate and reverberate the densest fibres of guitar weavings. Its soft, cracked, granular texture makes it sound like the voicing of two worlds, one of matter and one of spirit, dividing everything in two, before bringing everything back together in a harmonious unity. His language that hovers over the music as our consciousness spreads over the world, is a language of contradictions, of opposites attract, of ambiguities and revelations, of imagination going on an adventure trip. That’s the constant path this music and its accompanying voice seem to be taking from album to album: expanding and contracting, hiding and revealing. Their musical world has something strangely metaphysical. It attempts to make way and create space – beyond the rational progression of the present tense of the music -, for a dreamlike yet fundamental experience of life’s momentous episodes.

The nature of both their music and words is very similar. The lyrical writing of Kilbey seems to imitate the process of music making and the essence of music itself, which is something very unusual in the world of pop and rock. His language could of course be simply described as a form of poetry, maybe of the existential kind, covering all sorts of topics ranging from the celestial to the anodyne everyday kind of subjects. Yet there’s more to it. The Church never wanted to write down their lyrics, they didn’t include them in a written form on their various albums. They wanted to keep them free-floating, like the music in a way.

Music is an energy, we all know that, we can feel it soar through our bodies, feel how it moves everything from our limbs to our soul. But so is language essentially. Music is always a form of time being, time showing itself, developing from moment to moment; music is always enacted in the present moment. Language is our constant dialogue with the world, in the present moment, and I think that is precisely what Steve Kilbey wants to preserve by not “publishing” his lyrics in a written form. Just as music, language should be something transitory, free-flowing from the mind as it makes its way through our various perceptions. The articulated sound of language is in fact not so very different from the articulations, vibrations, pulsations produced by chords, drumbeats or keys. Language in Kilbey’s view seems to be the expression of a constant, busy activity of thoughts wandering around in our mind; language shouldn’t take on the appearance of a dead, static product delivered from the past, no, it should be like a living creation, invented on the spot, brought to life in the same time span as the music itself, forming an intriguing semblance or dissemblance – as pleases the artist – with its sparring partner called music. The words should keep the same freshness of the instant as the music so essentially by nature always beholds. Even the writing process itself – as a stream of consciousness – is very much akin to the creation of musical soundscapes. The interpretation of the words often open, lending themselves to multiple understandings, meanings that might even contradict themselves, mysterious combinations of words belonging to different realms of experience. Meanings that hardly make sense, until you listen to the music, until you let the music open a way for these cryptic words to come to life. Language is the house of Being, the house of our soul where it can regroup its many confusing thoughts. Just like music, language has a will, a way of its own, and doesn’t need to answer to anything or anyone. It takes its flow, naturally, as thoughts do, as music does. Language, just like music, is only concerned with itself. In the dialogue of music and words, the mystery of the word equals the mystery of the music. Steve Kilbey sensed this all along intuitively… He plays with the nature of language, defies it, defies and teases his listeners. Not making sense, never made more sense than in the puzzling concoctions of words assembled by Steve Kilbey…

Music is play. The truth of our being cannot be fully said in the dreary everyday talk of a standardised language. Our collage of words should adopt this same playful nature of musical creations. In order to make sense of our complex way of being we should dare to play the game of language as the lead singer of The Church does so well. Align music and words in a deeply original yet natural way. Words like water… Just like water always finds a way – its way – from the skies to the earth… The Church (re)unite music and lyrics in the same realm of infinite possibilities that they both carry with them; the voice, the great voice of Kilbey serving as a mediator. Spirit of music and spirit of language become one. It’s a true marvel to hear this holy union professed in the understated way and the profane disguise of what we most irreverently call some sort of pop rock…

Joke Roelandt, April 2020