Re: The Church (the band, that is) in Seattle

In light of the recent thread/discussion about nostalgia acts, it seemed a bit ironic that we had tickets to see The Church on their "Singles Tour." Of course, that doesn't have to mean that the group has nothing left to offer. Depeche Mode did their own Singles Tour in the late '90s, and they've kept coming up with new music since then. I remember Billy Joel doing a "Greatest Hits Tour" and telling a journalist that it's fair game for an artist, provided he does it only once. "As soon as you do a second tour like that, it's official that you're an oldies act," he said (a few years before he officially became an oldies act).

And in The Church's case, it's not as if they'd fill arenas with a nostalgia package. The biggest single they ever had only reached #24 on the Billboard pop charts. It didn't get much higher in their homeland; in fact, "Metropolis" was their only Top Twenty single in Australia. The biggest factor, to us — and I'm confident you'll agree — is that The Church has never really been a "singles act." Sure, they've released singles, and a few of them got some attention, but they've never really been defined by their singles. (Except maybe at the beginning of their career: Steve Kilbey told us about a gig in a small town in the Outback, in their early days when "The Unguarded Moment" was getting a lot of steam on Australian radio. He said the audience was so surly and jeering, calling them "poofters" and such, that by the end of the set, he decided he didn't want to play the one song he knew they wanted. This resulted in an ugly mob scene, and their manager taking some physical abuse before he barged into the dressing room and told him, "Steve, whatever they want, you better give it to them.")

Anyway! The show was terrific. With no opening act, The Church played a two hour and 45 minute set (with an intermission), touching on pretty much all the high points, as the setlist attests. The six-piece band sounded great, with a big enveloping sound that still had space for the instruments to move and breathe. They took off on a few psychedelic tangents that started to resemble Sonic Youth at their best. Kilbey was in fine voice throughout (and he looked great), and he had plenty more stories to share between songs, such as the one where he was tripping on acid and hallucinating that his cat was talking to him, asking, "Why'd you cut off my balls, man?" And this "singles set" covered a very wide range, from Of Skins and Heart all the way through their upcoming album, Lacuna.

This was the first night of the tour, so if they're coming near you, it'd be a good choice for a ticket.

SETLIST:
Columbus
Electric Lash
Tear It All Away
The Hypnogogue
The Unguarded Moment
Block
Metropolis
So Easy to Be Sad
The Realm of Minor Angels
Reptile
[intermission]
Almost With You
When You Were Mine
Ripple
Destination
Western
Constant in Opal
Another Century
Already Yesterday
Numbers
Under the Milky Way
Tantalized

ENCORE:
Sacred Echoes Part 2
An Interlude

I saw the Church only once, in Portland, years ago. The sound was bad and the band members were visibly unhappy with the setup and took it out on the audience, expressing their frustration and irritability. I have been toying with a ticket for their upcoming DC show on June 26, since I do like the band's material in general, but that one bad experience still hangs in the back of my mind.

I'm sorry you had such a bad experience, Zwirn. I've been lucky, seeing The Church four times without any experiences like that. The first show, in 2002, was especially magical: they chose to do an unplugged show. My wife still gets the tingles when we talk about it.

The Church certainly seems like the very definition of an "album" act, especially when we're talking about albums like Priest=Aura and Untitled #23, which were clearly conceived as start-to-finish experiences. (Not to mention the two most recent concept albums.)

But when I got Deep in the Shadows: The Classic Singles Collection nearly twenty (!) years ago, I was shocked to realize that the Church is, indeed, one hell of a singles band. They know how to knock that format out of the park, even though I bet not a single one of the songs on it was likely written with the "we need a single" ethos in mind. (I could be wrong, of course.)

I'm very much looking forward to their Austin appearance.

Thank you for those endorsements Delvin and Michael, I will get on that 9:30 Club show, although I am resentful of the ticket prices. (Ticketmaster has it at $56.35 a person, but that's the inflated price with surcharges, so I'll aim to swing by the box office ahead of time.)

OK, because I'm a pedant, here are my notes from the show in 2002. And lol at my remark about the $17 price tag, although, inflation-adjusted, that was around the equivalent of $31 at the time, and I had basically no full-time job in 2002.

2:365) 11-APR-2002 12:50 Michael Zwirn, on a Rocket to Russia

I ended up at a Church concert last night, which I probably would not have planned on if I had known it would cost $17. It's not destined for my list of great shows, unfortunately. I like the Church, but I have only a greatest hits album plus one or two others, and I don't know their new material much at all. The band had a few good moments but a lot of it I found kind of aimless. My favorites were "Electric Lash" and "Myrrh," but they had a lot of technical trouble, and the show never really got going. Perhaps the most interesting moments came as the band — an ensemble for whom technical proficiency and competence have always been strong emphases — tried to overcome one broken monitor and some defective cabling. During "Electric Lash" (my favorite Church song), Marty Willson-Piper would play guitar on the left side of the stage during the verses, then sprint over to the right side of the stage to sing harmony while a stagehand manipulated his effects pedals (on the left side of the stage). The result was a sort of technological dance between the two and a bemused Steve Kilbey (bassist and lead singer), who had to jump out of the way between each of Willson-Piper's peregrinations. Willson-Piper even sung his choruses in mock-Steven Tyler fashion into the microphone belonging to the other guitarist, lending the song an unusual honky-tonk flavor.

While these moments were of some interest, the show itself was uneven and overly diffident. Even "Under the Milky Way" was lethargic and perfunctory. It doesn't help that the band chooses to dress and present itself with roughly the degree of stage presence that a crew of accountants might bring. Kilbey, particularly, looked like a middle-aged businessman. Willson-Piper had a lot more presence on stage, particularly during some genuinely impressive amplified-acoustic soloes, but the show as a whole seemed to lack impetus.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/06/2026 05:26PM by zwirnm.

I've seen the Church several times and planning to see them in a few weeks (hi Michael). Each show was better than the last. It seems to me that Kilbey has comfortably fit into the raconteur role and genuinely seems to enjoy touring.

Funny story - one time the Church had just announced a tour and I went to the box office to buy tickets and when I said I wanted to buy a ticket for the Church, the guy looked at me blankly for a few seconds and then said 'I think there's one on the other block'.

Alas, the only time I've gotten to see the Church, it was at the Ready Room, the shittiest shithole of a venue St. Louis ever shat into existence. It was a double bill with the Psychedelic Furs, thus ought to have been a great show, but was anything but. The Ready Room had the most dumbfuck layout of any venue I've ever been to. It was a long, narrow room like most venues, but instead of setting the stage up on the narrow end on either side of the room, the stage was in one corner of one of the long walls, directly across from the wide entrance to the bar, which was in a separate room. They didn't seem to make any effort to figure out the best way for sound to travel in such a set up. I went to the show with a friend who had just had knee surgery and thus had to sit, so we were stuck at a table along the back wall, which was not far from the stage at all, but was to the right of the stage and not directly in front of it. The Church sounded like they were playing at the bottom of a well three blocks away, despite being maybe 50 feet away at most. They were literally being drowned out by chit chat at the merch table, which was not that much closer to us than the stage. Then when the Furs came out, you could hear them better, but they were just sludge.

We ended up leaving about five songs into the Furs' set, because not only did the Ready Room have the worst fucking sound of any venue I ever attended, it also seemed to have absolute nothing resembling climate control, and it was a hot summer night when it was still close to 90 degrees outside at 10 pm but it still felt like walking into air conditioning going outside from the oven like interior of the Rectum Room.

The worst part is is that during the several years of its pestilential existence, the Ready Room siphoned off tons of bands that might have played decent venues, because on paper it looked like the hippest club in town - it was in the coolest up-and-coming neighborhood in town and a look at its previous gigs calendar would've indicated that it was the hip, happenin' place to play in St. Louis, and of course no one would ever check to see if any acts ever played there more than once, because few ever did.

One of the few upsides of Covid was that it forced that hellhole out of business. That's the official story, anyhow. I have a feeling that the toxic word of mouth around the place was finally starting to affect its ability to book acts.

Anyway, that's the sad story of my one time seeing the Church. They've come to St. Louis one other time since then, but it was in the middle of my unemployed years and concerts were not in my budget.

Reno, the Ready Room sounds a lot like the Mammoth Events Center in Denver. That venue had it all, just like the Ready Room: dumbass design, with the stage situated in the wide side of the room, guaranteeing crappy sight lines for a lot of ticket-buyers, plus lousy sound and utterly inadequate climate control. Fortunately, that venue got bought and thoroughly renovated, reopening as the Fillmore Auditorium. From being almost a curse for music lovers to endure, it was transformed into one of Denver's finest venues.

They didn't play She Never Said?

I own about 17 albums by the band and am very well versed in their music. I created a Spotify playlist spanning their entire career from debut to their last album, but I never listened to it until I was on a long car trip this past weekend. On shuffle play, with the songs bouncing around eras, one thing stood out: the band has produced consistently good-to-great music that has rarely taken a dip (except for the mid '90s for like 2-3 albums, and even then, there were still some good songs mixed in).

Is there any other band that has been this consistently good--and as prolific--for as long?

Bevis Frond & the Dead C

The Church show last night was a lot of fun. Kilbey seemed a bit worse for the wear - dunno if he'd overindulged during the day (this town runs on craft beer, wine, weed, and coffee), or if maybe the sun just did him in. But he seemed to genuinely be having fun, and while the theater wasn't full, the folks who were there were audibly excited to see them.

It was the same setlist (reprinted below) - the only difference was that they skipped leaving the stage after the second set, and just went straight into the encore songs.

SETLIST:
Columbus
Electric Lash
Tear It All Away
The Hypnogogue
The Unguarded Moment
Block
Metropolis
It's No Reason
The Realm of Minor Angels
Reptile

[intermission]

Almost With You
When You Were Mine
Ripple
Destination
Western
Constant in Opal
Another Century
Already Yesterday
Numbers
Under the Milky Way
Tantalized
Sacred Echoes Part 2
An Interlude

I appreciate that they treated recent singles, plus the brand-new "Western," which isn't out yet, with the same depth as they did their classics. Their upcoming record was recorded here in Austin (they have a very wealthy patron here who's been paying for the albums since they started releasing them on their own label), and it did sound like some of the Southwestern vibe filtered into "Western."

They seem to have a solid fanbase in the Lone Star State, but they sold out two nights in Phoenix, so maybe Arizona is the heart of American Church fandom.

Michael Toland Wrote:
but they sold out two nights in Phoenix, so
> maybe Arizona is the heart of American Church
> fandom.

I think it may be more of situation where fans of alternative music don't get a lot of options so when someone comes that fits that criteria they come out in droves. My wife goes to visit her mother in Scottsdale, a couple of times a year and I try to find her shows to go to and it's hard to find good shows. I did send her to a Placebo records anniversary show (which was waaay out of her sphere of knowledge) and she sat next to the graphic designer of the Sun City Girls albums.

Michael Toland Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Their upcoming record was recorded here in Austin
> (they have a very wealthy patron here who's been
> paying for the albums since they started releasing
> them on their own label)

I'm aware of Kellen Lane Keller, the marketing professor, who has financially supported and helped manage them for years. I found this out by reading his brief bio in one of the marketing textbooks he has authored (I work in higher ed--otherwise I would have never come across this).

While onstage, Kilbey mentioned visiting Austin in 1990 because his (twin) sister had married a "Texas billionaire." I'm guessing Keller is not that person, since I can't imagine a marketing professor having that much money.

I keep getting this Keller mixed up with Austin real estate billionaire Gary Keller, who is also a patron of the rock music arts. And no, they're not related. (I checked.)

Like I said above, the Church just keeps getting better. I've seen them several times and other than 'Metropolis', 'Reptile', and 'Under the Milky Way', one never knows what they're going to get. No 'Miami' (a personal favorite) but I got 'Ripple' and a great drum duel between Tim Powles and Nicholas Meredith during 'Tantalized'. Great show.

Wish I had made it last week, but life got in the way.