Church Car “Church Of” LP (Island House)

I’m not sure how we got here but I’m happy we made it. What a genuinely pleasing listen from people whom (full disclosure) I have known quite well for years.

As with most of his extensive and varied oeuvre, Big Daddy Mugglestone (Aaron Snyder) has laced much of the recording with layers of humor inflected by meter, genre (real or invented) and ‘tude. All the while Ian Douglas-Moore leads the duo melodically with steady crystallization of each idea at the appropriate pace. Each song unfolds in a way that actually leaves you wanting to know what will happen.

And hey this album achieves a heckuva lot without overly elaborate means. Two players with a lot of tools at hand that don’t overdo it. At times it’s an entertaining rollick through a specific world they created. The music has its own sense of gravity and a slightly warped logic, I avoid the words psychedelic or avant-garde. Like listening to music on another planet where the sound travels differently because of the unusual atmospheric properties.

“Big Daddy’s Waltz” is a walking-backwards triple-meter exploration of a cityscape melting eventually into a cozy greater woodlands that could be found as easily outside New York City as Berlin. Maybe take the trail back home before dark though.

There’s something coolly delightful about the way these two longtime friends and collaborators converse. By converse I mean it literally: there’s actual talking, as in the piece “Incise”. Dueling until rapt, the discussion— the content of which, take what you will from it—leaves one feeling kind of shaken. This is the dark side of an ever-present countryside looking-glass in Church Car’s music. For me, it’s like the feeling that sometimes emerges while walking disoriented, possibly high—just as possibly overworked in the current climate—moving through certain rush-hour urban locales. Until the word “church” appears from the now-spinning sonic underbrush, bringing you settling back into the matter at hand.

The album’s centerpiece for me is “(church of),” with its ever-shifting sense of looking out a Greyhound window at night with the lights and shadows moving across the vehicle interior. It’s an apt conclusion to a legit escapade through wholly original musical pastures.

– From KLOF Mag-
The guitar stabs, the drones, the minimal piano, the punchy post-rock drums are all there, but in a way that feels like it could all tip over into some glorious mess at any point. It drags you along for the ride, and that’s the joy of it: Church Of is music that puzzles and pinches and cajoles you along by any possible means, but it’s always headed towards something new and exciting.