FORGET YOURSELF

After the quite nice and more acoustic album After Everything Now This in 2002 this legendary and much underrated australian band is releasing with their 17th album Forget Yourself their best album ever. In contrast to every other band that started in the 80's these guys were not deteriorating on their CDs over the years and decades but instead becoming better and better. With this album they would actually deserve to be accepted as an important band in progressive psychedelic Rock.

THE CHURCH have been releasing consistently solid albums over a period of more than 20 years without ever gaining the attention and success they would have deserved and did their music during all this time exclusively for their own and their die-hard fans. One of the reasons for this could be the fact that their music does not fit properly in any preformed category making it maybe really progressive in a literal sense in some way. On the other hand their music sounded on most of their albums in the past always more like 80's Indie Rock merged with some floydian space elements. Usually when I'm listening to some previous albums of them bands like Jesus And Mary Chain, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Verve or U 2 are coming immediately to my mind since their music is as well very much guitar dominated. But these are just my own thoughts and they don't have to be correct necessarily.

Coming back to the main topic that is Forget Yourself: The songs on this album actually were recorded during "live" studio sessions and one can easily hear this. They are sounding rough in some way and much more powerful than on any previous album, almost like they would have had some rejuvenation or would have taken some "magic potion". The first song Seaside is showing clearly that the sound has changed compared to previous albums. We hear a heavy bassline, distorted guitar licks by Willson-Piper and of course Kilbey's vocals stronger than ever in the focus of everything. Song In Space is another very strong track, which sounds really spacey with guitar melodies floating high above the ethereal vocals, bass and cymbals. The Theatre And Its Double and Telepath continue in the same vein, real great Space Rock indeed. See Your Lights reminds a bit to their earlier stuff, but sounds much heavier and more "up-to-date" and Kilbey's sardonic vocals sound better than ever. Lay Low has quite a strong industrial goth rock feeling and it's again a very strong track. Actually on the whole album there is only one track which is a bit weaker than the rest, that is Reversal. The use of vocoders sounds too much "forced" to me and too "popular" since this effect has been used already extensively in pop songs.

As a CONCLUSION I'd like to say that Forget Yourself is for sure the best album THE CHURCH ever released, although I'm hesitating a bit to call it a masterpiece in Prog. Unfortunately the band is in some way in a very unlucky situation. They neither succeeded ever in the Prog genre, probably because their music has a too strong Indie Rock character, nor will they harvest any appreciation even with this very good record in the over-saturated (with crap of Spears and the alikes) Pop Rock market since for this they are simply too good. Without any doubt this one deserves 4 stars.