Αναλυτική Περιγραφή
Devon Church is a singer-songwriter hailing from Winnipeg, Manitoba
and based in New York City. He was, for many years, a multiinstrumentalist, co-writer and producer of the dreampop duo Exitmusic,
whose album, Passage (Secretly Canadian), Pitchfork described as
“insurgent, cinematic, and sometimes brilliant.” In 2018, the same year
that Exitmusic released it’s swan song, The Recognitions (felte), Church
released his solo debut, We Are Inextricable (felte), which employed the
textural electronic elements he had harnessed during the Exitmusic
years in the service of a songwriting style rooted in the folk rock
tradition, with deep nods to Cohen and Dylan. The results, according to
Allmusic, were both “affecting and musically inventive.” Having gigged
throughout the US in 2019 (opening for the likes of Orville Peck, Adam
Green, Kirin J Callinan and Black Marble) Church set to work recording
his latest offering, Strange Strangers, while seeking refuge from the
global pandemic in a barn in rural Pennsylvania.
The album’s opening track, “This is Paradise (But Not For Us),” is an
ironic complaint sung by an itinerant Adam & Eve to their absent father,
a kind of gnostic protest ballad in waltz time. It sounds as if Apollo-era
Eno had wrested the controls (and the handgun) from Phil Spector
halfway through the recording of Death of a Ladies Man. The
atmospheric elements of Church’s past productions are sublimated
throughout the album, put into the service of tape-saturated vocals,
combo organs and guitars. His voice, grown more confident and
understated since his debut, still ranges from a laconic Lee Hazelwood
hangover to a smoky Tom Waits growl, but it smooths out nicely on
tracks like the intensely melodic and propulsive ”Flash of Lightning in a
Clear Blue Sky.” Angelic backing vocals by Church’s partner, the artist
Ada Roth (who also co-directed two delightfully strange videos for the
album) lend an aura of dreamlike lightness in contrast to the baritone of
the album's world weary narrator. When, in hushed tones reminiscent of
Hope Sandoval, Roth comes to the front of the mix to deliver a lyric like
“We’re so bored of the apocalypse,” things take a subtly menacing turn
toward pop surrealism.
A sense of cosmic black-humor has crept into Church’s lyrics, which
deal with a sort of bewildered pilgrim’s progress through various spiritual
and material Bardo states. "Jesus was a genius," sings the Adam
character in This is Paradise, "but I prefer his early stuff." On ”What is
Consciousness?/St Teresa,” a suite featuring arpeggiated analog synths
and slide guitar by indie rock virtuoso Delicate Steve, Church answers
the question, "What is consciousness?" with the wry formulation of the
Tibetan crazy wisdom teacher Chögyam Trungpa: "Mostly your bad
habits." And on the languidly psychedelic ”Slouching Toward
Bethlehem,” in the midst of a string section and what sounds like a choir
of monks, Church reflects lysergically on selfhood itself:
Slouching toward Bethlehem
Giving birth to myself again
Wondering where my body begins
And where the bacteria ends
Strange Strangers borrows its title from the eco-philosopher Timothy
Morton: ‘The strangeness of strange strangers is itself strange, meaning
the more we know about an entity the stranger it becomes.’
On Ephemera, Church seems to lament the mysterious unknowability of
these objects of our deepest desires and fears, but he does so with
defiant exuberance, his ecstatically strummed acoustic guitar
threatening to go off the rails. “I was weary and you took me in your
arms," he sings to the other (a lover, a god?). "I couldn’t see you, but
you held me like the light holds the dark.”
