Customer Reviews

Hologram of Baal

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

After two nondescript albums, "Sometime,Anywhere" and "Magician Among The Spirits", the Church returns to its former glory with Peter Koppes back as a full fledged member. "Anaethesia" is a great opening track. Tim Powles' drumming and production are very instrumental in the success of this album. "Louisiana" is easily the best single the band has released since "Under The Milky Way". This is the first album since "Priest=Aura" that I make sure I listen to in its entirety. The only reason I did not give it 5 stars is because I think a band should only have one 5 star album. That album would be "Priest=Aura" for me, but Hologram comes very close. I look forward to more albums from the band with Tim Powles at the production helm.

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.

In the liner notes for Hologram Of Baal there is a credit for William Bowden, who contributed "radiotronics" to six of its songs. For me there's something radiotronic about the whole album - the engineering (by drummer Tim Powles) gives the music a distant, fuzzy ambience, so that it sounds as if when listening to the record I'm actually tuned into an AM radio station. Such an atmosphere initially flustered me, such that I felt the album to be rather stodgy and bogged down; however, the more I listen to it, the more I feel that the production enhances the record's easy, unhurried mood. With the exception of No Certainty Attached, which to me seems to be a little forced, Hologram Of Baal shimmers with densely layered waves of guitar and graceful, unhurried song structures. Louisiana, Tranquility and the astonishing Glow-Worm are particularly glorious.

It seems that it was at around the time of the release of Magician Among The Spirits that certain critics began to weary of The Church and that words such as "bloated" and "tired" were bandied around in the circles of those who were in the know. For me, however, the latter record and Hologram Of Baal epitomise everything that I like about The Church - in particular, their continual avoidance of being pigeonholed (early 1980s references to jangly psychedelia aside) and their proud hoisting of the flag of idiosyncrasy in the damp, sluggish atmosphere of simple guitar-based rock.

From the wondorous and dreamy melody of anaesthesia, to the sultry imagery of Louisiana the Church have produced another gem in a career rich in splendour. The double CD (the normal LP and an extra instrumental supplement entitled "Bastard Universe" is truly the only way to purchase this album. The extra five dollars is definitely well spent on the second disc. All we need to know now are US tour dates! I would highly recommend this album to any fan new or old of Steven Kilby and his eclectic moody group of Austrailian rockers. They are the best soundtrack for thought, sometime anywhere.

I bought HOB when it first came out, the same as all the other albums I've bought from the church, by stumbling across it in the record store, with the exception of Starfish. My impression as I flipped through the songs on the disc was, well No.5 sounded pretty good, so I played it a few times. I didn't think about it again until I stumbled across Box of Birds-which I love-and thought I'd give HOB a second chance. I've listened to it about a dozen times since then and if I'm in the right mood, I really like it. There is something very familiar about some of the songs, it sounds alot like starfish in some way and I got a feeling I haven't had in a long while. However, keeping in mind I probably need to give this record another couple of years to grow on me, much like most of the albums from the church, nothing in it really grabs me, okay it has some "nice aesthetic songs", but I would really like to hear something that really moves me. It's still just a little to "dreary" for me, and for all those things that are good about it, it's more of the same 90's church than of something else.

25 years ago a friend of mine brought over The Church's "Blurred Crusade" album and the rest, as they say, is history. Hologram of Baal is in my opinion their best effort. It has just the right blend of curb appeal mixed with the band's trademark of beautiful and haunting musical ideas, churned out from layered guitars and synthesizers. While many Church albums tend to grow on you, this one hit me like a ton of bricks and my love for this song collection has only grown over time.

"Anasthesia', `Louisiana', `Buffalo' and `Tranquility' are the strongest cuts, evoking hitherto unexperienced emotions with their ambient, surreal qualities. `Richochet' is reminiscent of their earlier work, while `This Is It' sounds like it could have come off of "After Everything, Now This'. This Church CD, more than any other (with "Priest = Aura" being perhaps the one exception), takes you on a musical journey not dissimilar to a Beatles' "Abbey Road" or a Moody Blues' "Children's Children's Children".

Some call this The Church's "comeback" album. While I suppose it's debatable whether or not they ever left, this work certainly proves they have arrived. Permanently. Superbly conceived, written, and produced. Just a fantastic CD I could never do without.

For me this album starts a new phase in the sound of The Church. The self-production is a mayor factor in their approach and the fact that Peter Koppes is a permanent member again, is evident in the interplay of the guitars (the trade mark of the band anyway).
"Louisiana" is the first example of this mellow, dense and ambient sound that goes on in the other similar sounding tunes; "Tranquility", "Buffalo", "Another Earth" and "Glow-Worm". The use of guitar feedback, reverbed distortion and radiotronics gives the music an almost symphonic sound that disperses very well and produces a huge wall of sound.
My favorite song from the bunch is "Buffalo", which has all the characteristics previously described, plus it really recreates musically a snowy atmosphere. The acoustic guitar with the tambourine feels like slow falling snowflakes, and the flanger effect makes you see the northern lights in a white forest in the middle of the night.
But from the other corner of the album is where the most interesting sounds come. My favorite song from the album is "Anesthesia", maybe because it makes me close my eyes every time I listen to it and feel it. "Ricochet" is an awesome piece of music with very mysterious lyrics and very cool guitar interplay between PK and MWP. To be honest I am more attracted to the darker side of The Church than the softer side, that's why I find more beauty in pieces like "The Great Machine" and "This is It" with the spacious yet claustrophobic feel.
The rocker of the album is "No Certainty Attached", a very cool song with a nice work in the vocals and of course the rocking guitars. This could have been a nice radio hit in an ideal world.
Hologram of Baal is very nice album that starts a new phase in The Church sound, and shows that the band can reinvent them self in every album without loosing their trade mark quality in well crafted pieces of music. For my taste it has a little too much mellow songs, but not that they aren't good.

Although their last couple of releases (Magician Among the Spirits and Somewhere/Anywhere) were pretty palatable to at least the diehard amongst us Church fans, this one harkens back to Starfish (still the best - with Priest=Aura a close 2nd, in my humble esteem!) with its fresh yet dreamy texturing. I saw them in concert just 2 days after finding Baal in my favorite music store, and I tried frantically to familiarise myself with the tunes on it, only to find that their set was something of a "greatest" collection, with only Buffalo and Louisiana getting stage play. But that was fine, as I had waited quite a few years to hear my old favorites (Ripple, Myrrh, Lizard, Grind, Two Places at Once, and even Old Flame!) played for me to wallow blissfully in. Baal has since been in my car magazine about 75% of the time since last October. Anaesthesia is by far my favorite track, with Tranquility a close second. Do buy it!!