Another Century, another dream, another album from a band that's in too deep to go anywhere but ever closer to the other side. Man Woman Life Death Infinity is the 26th album by the Church, and their second with the rejuvenated line-up Steve Kilbey, Peter Koppes, Tim Powles and Ian Haug.
The epic return of 2014's critically lauded Further/ Deeper blossomed into a road-hardened beast over four tours of the USA, two back home in Australia, and a new career high in front of 20,000 Spanish fans on a lap of Europe.
Man Woman Life Death Infinity is where the revitalized quartet's freshly tuned chemistry reaches a new potency and precision: ten songs, 45 minutes, and a quantum leap into unexplored territory as strange as it is irresistible.
"Music is like inner space and we're astronauts," says guitarist Koppes, who co-founded the Church in Sydney in 1980. "It's a spellbinding thing. It's hypnotizing. That's why people like it. It takes them into another world and we're here to open those doors."
"This is the Church's water record," says Kilbey, singer, lyricist and bassist. "I guess water is my element. I've always marveled at the sea and rivers and rain. It wasn't conscious at all but on reflection, it definitely is a preoccupation on this record. What that means, I don't know."
It was the unknown, as is customary with this extraordinary band, that gave first breath to Man Woman Life Death Infinity in April, 2017. Some 30 songs materialized over two five-day jams at Haug's Airlock Studios in Brisbane, and Powles' Space Junk II in Sydney.
A month of contemplation determined the recording agenda for the month of May at Sydney's Rancom Studios, where long-term audio accomplice Ted Howard co-produced and ultimately mixed the final album in August.
"On the last couple of records, the jams went straight to tape," says Kilbey. "This time there was that extra process of assessing and in some cases re-learning them. But nobody arrived with ideas. It was all invented on the spot. We all contributed to this album pretty equally."
"Ian is a big part of the band now," Koppes says of the former Powderfinger guitarist who made his debut on Further/ Deeper. "He's a consummate, intuitive musician with fantastic tones. If the last album was the epitome of rock sophistication, I think we've progressed even further with this one."
Consider for openers the dizzying modulations and exhilarating chorus payoff of the first single, ‘Another Century.’ ‘Submarine’ is another world again, with its sinuous electronic undertow percolating for a full two minutes before Kilbey's echoing inner voice surfaces somewhere between desert and sea.
For ‘King Knife’ is "a child's song; a fairy tale sung with wide eyed wonder by a naughty boy," the singer reflects. "Naive rock and English kids' books from the 1950s." The deeply chiming second single ‘Undersea’ is the ominously descending result of Kilbey's suggestion that the band should pretend to be another one altogether, like Sgt. Pepper wilfully choosing the brown acid.
"Tim borrowed my son's little electronic drum kit," Haug reveals, "so we had a mutated kit, half acoustic/ half electric, and we were just firing off each other.”
"Peter is like the mad professor of guitar theory. I've learned a lot from him over the last few years but I'm not trying to analyze the harmonic integrity of anything. If it sounds good, I'll keep going down that path. I think we complement each other really well in that way."
The dramatic closer, ‘Dark Waltz’, "is one of my favourites," he adds. "I had all those progressions and I didn't even know if was gonna make it to the finish line. When I heard what Steve had done later, it all made sense."
And so the mercurial alchemy rolls, from the ecstatic shimmer and jangle of ‘I Don't Know How I Don't Know Why’ with its singing jailbirds and mushroom-flavoured waiting rooms, to the crocodile whispers, monsters and mirages and rocking boat hypnosis of ‘A Face In A Film.’
"The way I write lyrics is very stream-of-consciousness," Kilbey says. "I never question them until we perform live, so I discover them in time as much as the audience.
"It's a weird thing to sit there in a recording studio and then bang, a song falls out of the sky. Then maybe eight years later you're standing there singing it in front of a thousand people you go 'Oh, that's what that's all about'…"
As always, the road beckons for the inner space astronauts with the almost 50-year psychedelic wake that can only boggle and confound any rational attempt at writing the nightly set list. Suffice it to say that when the lights go up and the all-time classics are balanced against the imperative of perpetual progress, Man Woman Life Death Infinity will hold its many heads high.
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