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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful and Mezmerizing, June 4, 2002
It's amazing to me that anyone could listen to this album and think "bland" or "tired". This album ranks right up there with 'Starfish" and "Priest = Aura" in terms of sheer ambient melodic bliss.The opening track, "Anethesia", is one of the highlights of the album, a beautifully layered song that rises and falls, taking the listener on a journey to the inner conscious. "Louisiana" is easily their strongest single since "Milky Way", while "Tranquility" will transport you away to a world not populated by worries, struggles and fear. Listening to "Buffalo", you will feel like you are sitting by a fire in a house in snowy Buffalo in the middle of winter...you can almost feel the chill. "The Great Machine" is the Church at their most eerie and brooding, a cataclysmic view of a distraught world sometime in the future. The beautiful cinematic closer, "Glow-worm", is one of the most charming, soaring pieces the Church have ever recorded. Fitting, then, that vocalist Steve Kilbey wrote it as a love song to his daughter. this album represents a stunning comeback for the band, and shows them at their finest creative peak. Don't pass it up.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A refreshingly new, yet nicely familiar release, November 30, 1998
Many people in the world wouldn't know who the Church are anymore these days. Older Aussies might remember them for early hits like "The Unguarded Moment" and "Almost With You," and of course a fair number of souls around the planet would recognize their one big hit from '88 "Under the Milky Way" if they heard it on the radio (and some may even remember its name). Apart from that though, the Church has basically creeped along silently through the music business, writing some of the most unique and interesting music this end of the century without much recognition for their distinct genius. They've had their shares of glories and upsets, but few bands have held out so long with so much of their integrity intact. Hologram of Baal is simply a continuation of this uniqueness in style. Or perhaps a resurrection of it. After all, this is the first album with guitarist Peter Koppes fully in the fold since '92's brilliant Priest=Aura, and it definitely shows. While not bad by any means, both 1994's eclectic Sometime Anywhere and '96's somewhat inconsistent Magician Among the Spirits were certainly lacking his finer touch on the guitar to fill in all the loose ends. This time around though, he's clearly back, as the ever-familiar intertwining of guitars courtesy of Pete and melodic-counterpart Marty Willson-Piper create a myriad of beautiful sounds weaving their way all throughout the album. Although Hologram of Baal has neither the thematic polish and mystic quality of Priest=Aura nor the full-on, bombastic energy of '85's Heyday, it is easily a pleaser after a few listens. "Tranquility" soars with thick, ethereal guitars, "No Certainty Attached" kicks in some of the extra overdrive (and a little of Marty's signature guitar style) and "Buffalo" is one of the Church's best candidates for a hit single in years (too bad "Louisiana" beat it to the goal). Other standouts include the gorgeous "Glow-Worm," the darkly plodding "This Is It" and the fantastic "Anaesthesia." The extra cd is an added gift, but it would probably be of little interest to the lukewarm fan (who'd be bored by its 70+ minute length). Starfish is still the most commercially-viable album in the band's history (something which some fans may find a disagreeable quality), but don't write the Church off as an old, dead band. In a world of dull, poser artists where 'alternative' has ceased to hold any sort of meaning anymore, it's a nice relief to know there are still some musicians out there that can keep their heads well above all the trends. It's just too bad that more people don't know about them, but I guess after all the tastes of the 'average' may be just that.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a mirky masterpiece, January 13, 2002
When people are working on a creative project together, it's always a gamble when you monkey with something that's working well. Clearly, after 1990's Gold Afternoon Fix, the Church were feeling a pain in their temples. Internal combustion saw eight-year drummer Richard Ploog depart from the lineup. This was the first hint that a rift could open and that the Church was due to wander in the creative wilderness. 1992's Priest=Aura offered hope that the band was coming together again, but after cofounder Peter Koppes left in 1992, the real drifting began, and the next two records (1994's Sometime Anywhere and 1996's Magician Among the Spirits), while marked with some great highpoints, mapped the inconclusiveness of the band's travels.In contrast to the spare, even skeletal Sometime Anywhere and Magician Among the Spirits, 1998's Hologram of Baal emerges as a thickly textured wonderment of layered guitars and radiotronics. It's the first record to feature Church cofounder Peter Koppes' return after a long hiatus, and the first Church record upon which drummer and full-fledged member Tim Powles contributes fully. On HOB, both members offer a return to creative union that drove the band through their formative years and commercially successful peak in the 1980's and early 1990's, yet offer a renewed sense of innovation and creative vision that breaks the code of the stagnation endgame. Most tracks are slow to mid-tempo and with the exception of the occasional cloud break ("Louisiana", "Tranquility"-which is incredibly beautiful), HOB is obscured by cloudy guitars to impressive effect. The electronic, early-tech sounds add a creepy, simultaneously pre-Cambrian and post-apocalyptic effect that plays well with both the guitars and the lyrics. The opening track, "Anaesthesia", opens with a fading, irregular sequence of blips-it's as easy as it is disturbing to imagine Steve Kilbey going in for surgery hearing the sounds of an irregular EKG-though to hear him sing it, he seems to be in touch with the feelings the drugs provide. "Anesthesia's coming/anesthesia's coming/I don't know why/I feel like I'm flying . . .". The Church have really matured their uncanny knack to take the raw element of shimmering sheets of guitar sounds and sculpt them to communicate feelings of emergence, confusion, mysteries of the ages, and what they imagine to be transcendence. They succeed most as artists when they use the strength of this approach to support Kilbey's enigmatic, arcane words. "Ricochet", "Louisiana", "Tranquility", "Buffalo", "Another Earth", and "Glow-Worm" do this to great effect. The ponderous "The Great Machine" and the somewhat wooden "No Certainty Attached" are slightly weaker points, but are among the strongest comparatively weak tracks the band has ever included on a record. One could make an argument that HOB is the best record The Church has ever made. I wouldn't go quite that far, but it's definitely one of the top three to-date. The new single, "Numbers", shows promise for further great, challenging, evolutionary work, and I await their new full-length, "After Everything, Now This", with great anticipation.
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by The Church 
