A hundred lifetimes ago

Another Aussie band, right next to the Chevelles in my collection.



I bought a tape of this album (The Blurred Crusade) on a lark while vacationing in Perth with my family in the Summer (Aussie Winter) of 1983, after reading a review that highlighted the Church's "jangly guitar interplay". For the rest of the trip, I played the first two songs ("Almost With You" and "When You Were Mine") over and over again, but couldn't get into the rest of the album.

It was the first of many Church albums where I loved one or two songs (usually the singles) but was lukewarm on the other eight or nine. I love every song on their Aussie best-of Almost Yesterday, missing only a handful of Church songs that aren't on it.

I own all their 80s albums (pre-recorded cassettes from four continents), but the only Church album qua album I'd consider essential is their U.S. breakthrough Starfish. The Church lost me in the 90s, and even though I've liked some of what I've heard from them in the 2000s, their newer songs don't have the endurance that their earlier ones did. But songs like "When You Were Mine" will always rock, now and forever.