release date: Sep. 8, 1998
format: cd
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,66]
producer: The Church
label: Cooking Vinyl - nationality: Australia
*Track highlights: 1. "Anaesthesia" - 2. "Ricochet" - 3. "Louisiana" (official video, short version) - 4. "The Great Machine" - 5. "No Certainty Attached" - 6. "Tranquility" - 7. "Buffalo" - 8. "This Is It" - 9. "Another Earth" - 10. "Glow-Worm"
*[all tracks]
10th studio album by The Church, which here consists of Steve Kilbey, Peter Koppes, Marty Willson-Piper, and Tim Powles. The album follows the critically acclaimed Magician Among the Spirits from 1996. Koppes had left the band back in '92 after the release of Priest = Aura due to disagreements with Kilbey and Willson-Piper, and the band continued until '97 when the trio of Kilbey, Koppes, and Powles released Pharmakoi / Distance-Crunching Honchos With Echo Units as The Refo:mation founded without Willson-Piper. Subsequently, Kilbey decided that The Church should release just one more album before finally disbanding. The Church therefore embarked on a farewell tour in Australia, which was surprisingly quite successful, and the last grand finale in Sydney convinced all members to give it another shot in the studio. For the first time, they found themselves in full control of the production assisted by the band's new drummer Tim Powles, and with him at the helm as sound engineer and mixer, they managed to combine the band's original strengths with a new distinctive set of traits. Powles is also mentioned in several places as the person who managed to shelve old internal tensions between Kilbey, Koppes, and Willson-Piper and make them all look ahead. The album was released in Australia on the label Festival Records, in Europe on Cooking Vinyl, and for the North American market by Thirsty Ear and True North. After the release, the band went on their first world tour for many years, which led the group to New York, where Kilbey was arrested and sentenced to community service for buying heroin.
The album garnered generally positive reviews and is one of the band's most coherent and better albums, which clearly wins for a special feeling for a whole cast rather than individual strong compositions. There are no fillers and the 'featured highlights' above are all ten tracks.
[ allmusic.com 4 / 5 stars ]
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| org. Australian cover |
