Review: The Church at Freo.Social

The Church at Freo.Social
Sunday, June 11, 2023

For those awake to Australian music in 1980, The Church landed with a seductive pastoral flourish; old souls reporting through a psychedelic veil, with the weft and warp Of Skins and Heart. The dreamy muscularity that hung on the bones of those early offerings embedded themselves in listeners, becoming lore and anthem in equal measure.

Founding members Koppes, Wilson-Piper and Ward/Ploog no longer ride with Kilbey, but the foundations they laid in those formative years remain intact, ready to catapult The Hypnogogue’s bold aspiration.

Over forty years later The Church fields perennial razor-witted wordsmith raconteur Steve Kilbey centre-stage, enveloped by Ian Haug (guitars/vox), Ash Naylor (guitars/vox), Jeffrey Cain (guitars/vox/synth), Tim Powles (drums/percussion) and Nicholas Meredith (drums). With clarity, restraint and seamless concord, the group traversed with panache The Hypnogogue, salted as it is with and transmogrified gems from their back-catalogue, rendering all with mystical and surreal pulse perfectly before an apocalyptic closer.

A sea of generously proportioned mid-life teens stood in eager anticipation before the house music receded, and a hollow distant synth-rich tide advanced, cradling a minacious monotone commentary: ‘the world that was, is no more.’ Into this ferment, first the players and their acolytes came together in full voice with Ascendence.

A dramatic entrée yes, but given The Hypnogogue is a concept album, there would need to be connective tissue, so with ‘mood’ firmly coalescing, Kilbey the storyteller took hold. His monologue held the room on a biscuit from the first phrase as he drilled deep into the mind of Antarctica’s journeyman pop rock pilgrim Eros Zeta, 30 years hence, who after suffering a brain freeze, heads to Korea in search of the beautiful uber scientist occultist Sun Kim Jong and her famed contraption The Hypnogogue; a machine that sucks music from dreams and churns them into chart-topping bangers.

Kilbey’s fanciful chronicle would stitch every freshly hatched and re-imagined album track into a cosmic whole with devilish wit and winking barbs; and this congregation craved nothing less.

From Starfish (1988) they plucked Destination, from Gold Afternoon Fix (1990) Metropolis and from Heyday (1985) Columbus; their bittersweet testimonies reignited. Cue new No Other You and the psycho-mometer rose before revisiting Kings from Priest=Aura (1992).

Following inevitable misadventures exacted by the Hypnogogue, Eros Zeta ascends to a celestial plain of sorts and in his defence helps the gatekeeper rummage through old transistor radio echoes to find his song that made everyone in the world happy. “No not that one, or that one, or that one,” then “oh no, I hate this song…” The Unguarded Moment.

Back on terra firma and stuck in traffic and sombre in the back seat of a taxi, Eros hears by chance over the radio, Flickering Lights (1982), then through bright strings and Kilbey’s plaintiff tone, The Hypnogogue’s title track in all its intoxicating, cinematic extravagance.

Eros’ trials continue at Hotel Womb (Starfish), but after picking up his six-string bass guitar, Antarctica releases a warming heartbeat from its icy hollow.

Bass cast off, three shimmering acoustic guitars hailed Old Coast Road from Further Deeper (2014) and with it sunshine and feint hope until, lost and wandering The Hypnogogue’s reverberant labyrinth, we encounter Albert Ross.

Before the break, it was the salutary tale of a squealing blinkered US agent “Steve I can’t put this record out…American kids don’t like shit like this.” Behold the divinely melancholic ode: Fly from Séance (1983).

Beyond, the narrative threaded through One Day (Séance), Come Down (Magician Among the Spirits 1996) and the anthemic Almost With You (The Blurred Crusade 1982).

“In 2054 the kale and the aioli are all gone and so are the birds and the bees and the flowers, however there are still managers…” and Eros finds himself in the clutches of a shrill New York hack, instructing him, through C’est La Vie, to “just write some fucking songs like everybody else.”

Watching Miami Vice on TV one night Kilbey recalls “handsome but brutal faces with mirrored sunglasses and bags of cocaine, before cops turned up with machine guns. So they jump into a speed boat out to the yacht…and guess what song was playing while all this shit was happening?” Milky Way.

“This is a song from 1990 and the inevitability of the whole damn thing” introduced Grind (Gold Afternoon Fix), before the freshly minted I Think I Knew rolled into the frenetic Tantalised and its somnambulant smouldering bedfellow Second Bridge.

Encores Reptile (Starfish) and You Took (The Blurred Crusade) shot out and up into the architecture, driving home the brash subcutaneous vigour of this World Tour line-up. After 43 years and in the age of the sound byte, The Church had released their first concept album into Fremantle’s favourite cavern as Kilbey’s glorious pilgrimage continues.

ALAN HOLBROOK

Photos by Alan Holbrook