It's perhaps hard to believe that four decades into their career, long-running cosmic troubadours
the Church
have never recorded a full-on concept album. It's a psychedelic tradition that lead singer/bassist
Steve Kilbey
has explored elsewhere, as on 2021's
Jupiter 13
, one of several sci-fi-inspired collaborations with electronic musician
Martin Kennedy
. That said, pretty much every album by
has had the sustained atmospherics and Baroque goth drama of a Dayglo gatefold LP. It's an evocative vibe that
Kilbey
and the band push ever skyward on their monolithic and literate 26th album, 2023's
The Hypnogogue
. Opening with a rainbow-hued gurgle of what sounds like a spacecraft touching down on "Ascendence," the album doesn't so much wash over you as hover like a cosmogonic stone temple from which each song emanates. Technically speaking, the story at the heart of
is an enigmatic one, set in a dystopian future world in 2054 in which
plays a man at the edge of time, or perhaps his avatar dreaming of that man's past? It's all kind of woozy and opaque, yet endlessly intriguing.
Central to the album is the title track, a paean to the opiate nature of AOR itself when donning a pair of oversized headphones to listen to both sides of a spinning black disc was a metaphor for, and perhaps a gateway to, even darker avenues of oblivion.
sings, "As you went under into unknown/Remember the music pulled out of your head/Piano trickling into the cans/Insulating guitars, reptilian bass/Kick in your face, the snare in your heart." Snare you they do, crafting slow-burning anthems where
's hushed, late-afternoon
David Bowie
croon is framed by crescent-moon piano, rocket-engine percussion, and sun-flared electric guitars. Later, they rip into the echoey "Antarctica," a song that recaptures all the womb-like goth intensity and
Byrds
ian sparkle of their classic work on albums like
Of Skins and Heart
,
The Blurred Crusade
, and
Starfish
. Few bands of their day, and especially those of the post-punk '80s, are as consistent as
at writing songs that sound like more sophisticated and mature versions of their classic material. It's a sentiment
seems to ponder on "Succulent," singing, "I am the voice in another room/Entombed in the dead part of your heart/Voice from a gloomy future/Voice from a gloomy past." It's a tantalizing moment that feels like
and
are folding time and their own career into themselves, something they do throughout
. ~ Matt Collar