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The Church.
The Church have been mighty busy - and they aren't showing any signs of slowing down. They are currently in the studio, working on an all-new album, are about to release an acoustic album and have recently released 'Beside Yourself,' their fourth release in two years, (not counting solo releases and side projects in all quarters of the band). Having followed 'After Everything Now This' with a double album of remixes and extra tracks from that session, The Church have done the same after the 'Forget Yourself' release, without the remixes.
"What usually leads to this is we record too many tracks for the album," explains singer/bassist/songwriter Steve Kilbey. "Then our selection process isn't always the best, because of democracy or because of just trying to keep everybody happy, and six months later you go 'oh god, what did we put that on there for?' Then you hear another track in the can and when you've got a bit of distance from it, you go 'god this is really good, why didn't we think this should be on there?'
"I want an album to have an overall feel and sometimes a song doesn't really fit on the album. If you've got an album where you've got ten or eleven songs that are all coherent and kind of fitting in together, then you've got a twelfth song which is this great song but would be completely wrong then I don't think that song should go on."
He pauses. "And now you've got this thing to contend with: is the album a viable art form? With the advent of iPod everybody keeps pointing out to me that albums are irrelevant, it's just about songs. So now I'm completely confused when I'm supposed to sequence an album, like is this about songs or is this about the feel of the album or does anybody care? It's very complicated, you know," he says with a laugh.
'Beside Yourself' is made up of tracks released on their American label, extra tracks from the Forget Yourself sessions, b-sides from the Australian release of the Song In Space single and some rare tracks.
"I think it's a chance for people to get all those things together under one roof, so to speak. When we mastered this record, Marty [Willson-Piper, guitarist] and I were looking at each other going 'well, we've done it again', you know another record that's probably as good, if not better, than the actual one," he laughs.
"I definitely feel we are on a creative roll at the moment. We've got an acoustic album coming out next month, which has five new tracks and nine old ones completely reinterpreted. We even changed the chords and everything, it's pretty interesting.
"We're working on our, I think it's our seventeenth or eighteenth studio album right now and that's sounding pretty good to me as well. We've almost done all the guitar overdubs and about to start putting the vocals on."
The Church won't be playing in the vein of their upcoming acoustic album on their tour. "It's going to be so electric you won't believe it!" Kilbey declares. "If anybody wants to know what songs we're going to play the truth is we haven't even decided yet. It's going to be a real can of worms 'cause there's a number of different thoughts about what songs we should play and of course, just like deciding what songs go on an album, the selection process of what songs we play live is kind of like a democracy and often the result isn't that satisfactory," he sighs.
"When you kick a bunch of songs together it tends to be a bit of a compromise, kind of a hodge-podge, whereas if it was just up to me there wouldn't be any compromises to what people think about this or that. The other members of the band want to be a bit more audience-friendly, so I'm kind of extreme left and somebody else is the extreme right and the others are kind of the middle somewhere. So we all pull each other into this place where we play, we seem to play a certain bunch of songs 'cause they're the ones we all agree on."
Blake Lewis
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The Church play at the Governor Hindmarsh on Fri 12 Nov and 'Beside Yourself' is out now through Cooking Vinyl/Shock.
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