The Church inhabit a peculiar place in the minds of most American music lovers. The Australian band have been together for a whopping 35 years and their latest album—the sprawling Further/Deeper—is their 21st proper full-length release. While back home in Australia they are rightly respected as titans, here in the States their legacy is tied forever to "120 Minutes"-era college rock (specifically 1988’s eternal mix tape staple "Under the Milky Way") and for the uninitiated they presented a back catalog so long and dense as to feel a little impenetrable.
While it seems unlikely that Further/Deeper will do much to change the band’s Stateside legacy, it certainly doesn’t do anything to diminish it. The 12 tracks here deliver the same kind of languid psychedelia and pillowy atmospherics that have been a hallmark of Church albums for most of the latter half of their career. "Love Philtre" and "Volkano" are the band’s stock in trade—prolonged bits of mysticism narrated by frontman Steve Kilbey’s wry vocals. "If you touch us we disappear/ If you are waiting we are never here" he sings on "Let Us Go"—a track that, quite literally, could have appeared on any number of Church albums released in the last decade.
This isn’t necessarily a slight to the band, who have consistently delivered this kind of shimmery alt-pop for decades now, but this kind of psychedelic sameness grows tiresome after a while. Longtime fans will note the departure of longtime guitarist Marty Willson-Piper (replaced here by Powderfinger’s Ian Haug) as denoting a shift in the band’s sound, but anyone but a hardcore devotee would likely be hard pressed to discern any radical difference. Occasionally the guitars rip and roar ("Lightning White", "Toy Head"), but mostly they jangle and drift through these songs like smoke...another defining characteristic of the band’s back catalog.
It seems unfair to expect radical reinvention from a band like the Church—a shape-shifting outfit that has spent the better part of three decades more or less circling the same singular vibe. A discography 21 albums deep evidences the kind of career that few bands ever get to experience, but that kind of back catalog can also be stifling. More than five years since their last album, 2009's Untitled #23, Further finds the band trying (in baby steps) to play around with the tropes that have been the hallmarks of their career.
Historically, some of the band’s best songs ("Metropolis", "Ripple") have married druggy atmospherics with an airtight pop sensibility. If Further/Deeper fails on any front it’s that the single-appropriate pop moments feel too blandly adult contemporary (no one ever needs to write another song called "Laurel Canyon") and the record’s most grandly ambitious song—the epic eight-and-a-half-minute album closer—is, somewhat inexplicably, an ode to Miami. That being said, Further/Deeper is hardly a misstep—it’s a perfectly lovely addition to the band’s canon—but it’s not the kind of record that's going to usher in a new era or mesmerize people who haven’t already been blissed out on this band for decades.
