“Play your own fucking songs!” a bearded man yelled at Eric Church during the country singer’s headlining performance at 2024’s Stagecoach festival. Church, seated on a stool with his guitar in his hands and a gospel choir behind him, was midway through a freewheeling set — of hymns, covers of Neil Diamond and Al Green, and his own reworked hits — that was in stark contrast to his familiar anthems heard on country radio. Judging by the reaction of the crowd, which by the show’s end had thinned out considerably, it was Church’s Dylan-goes-electric moment, and that angry fan’s exhortation was his “Judas!”
But Church has never paid much mind to fulfilling expectations, and instead of shying away from the gospel sounds he debuted at Stagecoach, he brought the choir with him into the studio and doubled down with orchestral strings and horns. The result is Evangeline vs. the Machine, a record that is both dazzling and challenging, and creates a listening experience that upends the idea of what country music is — or at least the type of country music that first made Church a Nashville star.
It is also a masterwork. Evangeline vs. the Machine is just eight tracks, noticeably brief compared with its predecessor, 2021’s trio of LPs, Heart & Soul, but it cements Church’s legacy as a try-anything artist, one with more in common with David Bowie or Bob Dylan than his peers. It’s impossible to think of another mainstream country singer daring enough to emphasize French horn over electric guitar on a major-label album.
But the instrument is everywhere on EVTM, showing up on six of the songs. It announces “Evangeline” in a way similar to how the Rolling Stones relied on French horn in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” “Still the man that I was/Just a little more gray, a little more stay/A little less sting in my buzz,” Church sings in the ballad, a rumination on getting older and finding solace in music.
As he has on every LP since his 2006 debut, Sinners Like Me, Church hands over producer duties to Jay Joyce, and the duo continue to strike pay dirt. Listen to “Bleed on Paper,” one of two songs that Church didn’t write (Tom Waits’ “Clap Hands,” which ends the album, is the other), and marvel at the way the horns bash and pop around Church’s falsetto, and how the choir swoops in with its going-to-glory harmonies.
In the previously released “Darkest Hour,” a song Church rushed to streaming services last October to raise money for his hurricane-ravaged home state of North Carolina, the strings are all-consuming, with Church favoring his falsetto. The embrace of his upper register here reveals a man, at 48, in touch with a nakedly vulnerable side. This is Church the protector, be it of his hometown or of his two sons.
It’s the latter who inspired Evangeline vs. the Machine’s centerpiece, a stunner of a song titled “Johnny” that finds Church imploring the fiddle-playing hero of the Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” to return and vanquish a fresh round of evil. We’re in an age where “machines control the people/People shoot at kids,” he sings. “So run get your fiddle bow/And send him to hell again.”
The closest Church comes to giving fans something familiar on EVTM is “Hands of Time,” the album’s single. It’s catchy and glossy, with a sing-along chorus and shout-outs to familiar classic-rock fare like “Hollywood Nights,” “Back in Black,” and “Even the Losers” — a lyrical device Church used previously on his 2015 hit “Record Year.”
But he still refuses to spoon-feed, and the song proudly weaves in the overarching sonic themes of Evangeline vs. the Machine: horns, strings, and that rousing choir. It’s easy to be young at heart, he sings, “When you let some loud guitars and words that rhyme/Handle the hands of time.” In this album’s case, it’s unconventional sounds that get the job done.
