Of Skins And Heart

Of Skins and Heart is the debut album by the Australian psychedelic rock band The Church, released in April 1981 by EMI Parlophone. It peaked at No. 22 in the Australian Kent Music Report Albums Chart.

"Let it first be said that the title track of The Hypnogogue, the first new album from The Church in six years, is one of the most breath-taking singles they’ve released in years, a darkly psychedelic six minutes that slowly spirals into a menacing descent. That alone is reason to keep this one on your radar; the Australian neo-psych band have been going for over 40 years, with around a half dozen classic albums and zero bad ones, yet their ability to keep evolving and uncovering new aspects to their sound and approach only serves as a reminder of how vital they remain after four decades."

"Let it first be said that the title track of The Hypnogogue, the first new album from The Church in six years, is one of the most breath-taking singles they’ve released in years, a darkly psychedelic six minutes that slowly spirals into a menacing descent. That alone is reason to keep this one on your radar; the Australian neo-psych band have been going for over 40 years, with around a half dozen classic albums and zero bad ones, yet their ability to keep evolving and uncovering new aspects to their sound and approach only serves as a reminder of how vital they remain after four decades."

The Church - Deep In The Shallows: The Classic Singles Collection (2007) {2CD EMI Music}
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© 2007 EMI Music | 0946 3 90442 2 1
Rock / Neo-Psychedelia / Alternative / Indie

This 33-track overview plays like an expanded version of 1999's Under the Milky Way: The Best of the Church. The two-disc Deep in the Shallows: The Classic Singles Collection includes all of the obvious hits like "Unguarded Moment," "Under the Milky Way," "Ripple," and "Metropolis," while incorporating key tracks from the band post-1999 like "Numbers" (After Everything Now This), "Song in Space" (Forget Yourself), and "Block" (Uninvited, Like the Clouds). While the recent remasters of all of the original recordings remain the most solid recommendation for dream pop/alternative rock fans who missed the boat the first time around, this Classic Singles Collection is the perfect gateway drug.

This two-disc collection is a perfect introduction to the Church for new fans, given all the many singles collected from Of Skins and Heart up through Heyday, along with an album cut or two. As an overview of the band's evolution from catchy postpunk pop to its own thrilling musical recipe, along with some amusing liner notes from Kilbey song per song, it's a definite winner. But hardcore fans will want this collection as well for an even stronger reason – the inclusion of many B-sides not collected anywhere else. Ranging from the randomly goofy to the sublime, they give a great peek into the band's diversions and experiments over its first few years.

The Church - The Blurred Crusade (1982) {Parlophone-EMI Records CDP 790625 2}
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© 1982 Parlophone / EMI Records | CDP 790625 2
Rock / Neo-Psychedelia / Alternative / Indie

After such a fine debut as Of Skins and Heart, creating a follow-up might have been a burden for the Church – and maybe it was, but the end result was well worth it. Perhaps even better than their first, Blurred Crusade captures what for many remains the classic early Church sound, blending both the various strains of '60s inspiration and postpunk drive detected from the start with an even more elegant melancholy. Musically, both Willson-Piper and Koppes are just fantastic, their combination of guitar playing running the range from sparkling post-Byrds chime to sharp power. If the group doesn't fully explode here as much as later albums would demonstrate, especially on Heyday, that perhaps can be laid at producer Bob Clearmountain's feet.

The Church - El Momento Descuidado (2005) {Cooking Vinyl - COOKCD339}
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© 2005 The Church / Cooking Vinyl | COOKCD339
Rock / Neo-Psychedelia / Acoustic / Alternative / Indie

After 17 albums, Australia's premier purveyors of neo-psychedelic dream pop have finally come unplugged. The Liberation Blue Acoustic Series finds the veteran four-piece laying down 14 cuts – including five new tracks – over the span of a weekend. Beginning with "The Unguarded Moment" from 1981's Of Skins and Heart, they gently burn through classics like "Metropolis" and "Under the Milky Way" with an intimacy and intensity that feel more natural than any studio album that they've released in the last ten years.

Heart Under, Just Mustard's second album, asks you to forget what you know. At every turn, this remarkable record reconfigures and stretches the ideas and ambition of a rock band, and turns a year of lockdown and personal struggles into a breathtaking artistic statement. The music the five friends from Dundalk, Ireland make is strikingly untraditional. Though to look at them, it appears that the band are a five-piece with uniform make-up of a vocalist, two guitarists, a bassist and a drummer, not a single one of them utilizes their instrument in a confined or regular fashion. Guitarists David Noonan and Mete Kalyoncuoglu make their six-strings shriek and wail, the sounds produced sounding like everything from whirring machinery to horror movie monsters.