OF SKINS AND HEART [AKA: THE CHURCH]

The merits of the Church's debut album, Of Skins and Heart (issued as simply The Church, with a tweaked track list, in some territories) are perhaps easy to overlook in retrospect. The proliferation of jangle pop groups in the mid-1980s - especially on rhe UK independent scene that so strongly influenced them - means that what was innovative about their sound here sounds ordinary to years used to other bands playing with enchanted Byrds-like jangling guitar and a post-punk indie attitude. It's only when you look at the dates that you realise how extraordinarily ahead of their time they were - this was recorded in 1980 but sounds like it could have come out at the opposite end of the 1980s, revealing the Church as being as crucial to the development of this style as, say, Felt or Orange Juice, and perhaps more so given their greater international success.