CD Review: Church

[July 29th, 2009]

Church Song Force Crystal

[EXPERIMENTAL POP] When the Pixies’ now-legendary second album, Surfer Rosa, appeared in 1988, it helped to usher in a new era in the fledgling, underdeveloped genre of indie rock. The band’s approach to songwriting was simple—hit ’em with a quiet verse; a loud, rapturous chorus; and another quiet verse—but deadly and highly influential. Kurt Cobain once admitted to ripping off the Pixies’ song structures, and ever since then so has just about every band playing guitars and drums and keyboards. But few have succeeded quite as well as local avant-pop quartet Church.

The band’s debut full-length, Song Force Crystal—coming exactly one year after its still-remarkable Gold EP—shows a marked change in the band’s approach. Where Church’s older material often opted for wide, cavernous space in place dynamics, Song Force Crystal takes the group’s experimental tendencies and ratchets them up a notch. Many songs still drift like a bee in search of just the right flower, but almost every track on the album is filled with noise—clattering, floor tom-heavy percussion, skittering fret work, sighing clarinet (on both the instrumental “Quilty’s Guilty” and the gorgeous final minute of closer “Golden Girls”) and keyboardist Christof Hendrickson’s various analog synthesizers.

Many of the songs begin quietly, filled with pretty, twinkly synths, before exploding in a cascade of distortion and deep, fat analog bass. Opener “Graveyard” begins innocently enough, with pitter-patter drums, piano and waves of ambient noise. It’s a slow burner, a song that doesn’t crest until halfway through its six-minute run time—when guitarist-vocalist Brandon Laws’ guitar turns from a sparkler into a Roman candle, blasting slabs of molten sound over the bare structure. “Crab Magic” is both achingly pretty and unexpectedly heavy, deftly transitioning from Laws’ repeated refrain of “I won’t leave you outside” into a furious bridge and then back again.

The only real downside to this tactic is that, in the end, the record lacks a punchy, tactful single, something like Gold’s bouncy “Happiness”—a song that could propel Church to the place it deserves: a spot alongside Menomena and Nurses among Portland’s best weirdo-pop bands. Still, more than any local release this year, Song Force Crystal sounds like it was made for these times—even if its structures are easy to reproduce.