The Church

My essay on the lyrics written by Steve Kilbey for his band The Church:

My essay on the lyrics written by Steve Kilbey for his band The Church: The Instinct of the Intellect (January 2023)

Miranda. How on earth can equations be so cryptic and self-evident at the same time, I am wondering, listening to the opening song of one of the most sacred albums of The Church. It opens in a daze of history, hanging around it as a mythical aura. The dawning of a world …

A Different Tale about Rock (March 2023)

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 …

The Mythology of the Bush (July 2022)

Until a couple of years ago, the only song I knew of The Church was – as you can all guess – “Under the Milky Way”. And I loved it. In Belgium it was a radio hit, it still is today and the song is quite often played on pop stations. I remember singing along …

The Magnitude of Bondi Junction (February 2022)

The lost beginning, so typical of many a Church song – with, as an outset, only an intimation of the presence and passing of time. Steve Kilbey doesn’t feel the need to retrace it, this beginning; he is always already in the midst of the music and the words. And this is exactly how it should be, ideally. He has been immersed for the longest time in the …

1992: A Musical Time Odyssey (September 2020)

I’m gazing at a wolf dog in a barren landscape of dust and sand with some remnants of an old civilisation gone for ever. Pyramids. The dog looks sad but it survived every hardship. The indifference of the universe, only stoned material remaining. Still you can see and feel all that got lost, the missing link between the fierce animal and the ingeniously shaped constructions. Perhaps the best rock album …

Ephemerides (August 2020)

Marty Willson-Piper has of course mainly been praised for his astounding guitar skills, but in this gorgeous song Happenstance, I was kinda struck by his veiled, enigmatic voice and the way he lends the song a very delicate, ethereal dimension. Not that hard perhaps..

All the Things you Could See in a Girl’s Eyes (July 2020)

If only I could write an opening sentence in the way Steve Kilbey can, for this little text that features their 2017 album “Man Woman Life Death Infinity” (should I come up with one later on, I’ll just add it at the beginning). Yes, wordy beginnings …

Operettics #1 in Shorts (May 2020)

Is this what a smile sounds like, I mean, the movement of the lips and face, the twinkle in the eyes, the dimple in the cheeks, the warmth glowing from the heart up to the corners of the mouth, I mean, the opening sounds of “Operetta”? Is this what evenly balanced bliss sounds like? The beginning of this song …

Saturday Trousers (May 2020)

This is a bit of a girly take on the music of The Church, in this predominantly male bastion of Church goers. So this is for Mary… and Duncan… I don’t have much with Australian culture, don’t know much about it really, except for one thing. There’s an Australian movie I adore, called Picnic at Hanging Rock. It’s a little-known cult-film by …

The Realm of a Voice and a Guitar: Reflections upon Discovering the Music of The Church (April 2020)

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 …