From: Stefano Valenti, stefanovalenti4@libero.it
Subject: AENT - A Review?
Date: 2/9/2002 2:15:48 PM
To: Seance List, seance@lists.no-fi.com


Over the previous few days I've had little time for the Seance digest...too
many posts, too little time to read them.

Frankly, I was wondering "what the hell have these people to write about?
How come they have the time to spend all this time qriting while I barely
can find the time to just READ what they write"?

But now, I think I understand. Apparently, the reason is just playing up
from my portable cd player to my ears.

So...this morning I was wandering in a not so big music shop in San
Benedetto del Tronto, a seaside resort in central Italy where I'm looking
for a flat, now that I work there after five horrible years in Rome...and,
planning to meet a close friend of mine for lunch, I was browsing for some
records as a late birthday gift. After David Sylvian's "Dead Bees on a
Cake", I was only able to find "Hologram of Baal"...I asked the clerk,
"Don't you have anything else by the Church"? (I was looking for P=A), and
he replied "No...but we have their new one!".

"What!? You mean AENT??" "Can't remember its name...just know it's
there...", and he led me to the shelf where it had been placed.

I wasn't particularly anxious to listen to it...after all, I'm 34 years old
now, and I've gone through some disappointments, such as magicians who
failed to produce any magic at all and stuff like that. I spent the whole
day running around doing errands till I came back to my parents' home and
noticed that the record had been laying on the backseat, abandoned and
forgotten.

Can you think of a better afterdinner?

So...what can I say? After the disappointing SA, and the terrible MATS, the
band had already recovered some of their creativity with HOB. AENT is even
better, and at a first listen (the second has just begun as I'm writing) it
seems definitely good with some real peaks, although not a masterpiece.

"Numbers" is a great opening; I already know that "After Everything" and
"Chromium" will take place among my band's favourite songs and open some new
"Chrome Injuries".. "Seen it Coming", "Radiance" and "Night Friends" have
already struck a chord with me, that I know for sure.

So, I find myself listening to this record for the second time, on a
Saturday night spent at home, chained by a record just like I did when I was
16 and listened to "Boy" by U2 an entire Saturday night and knowing that
I'll have to fight back tears every so often.

Eighteen years have passed, but sometimes I'm not really sure. They seem
rather to have slipped on some hidden ground that has remained intact for
some strange reason, "After Everything".

I don't know anything about postproductions or on how to tell a good mix
from a bad mix; and, quite frankly, I simply don't care.

What comes to my mind is that hot summer afternoon in which I casually
listened to The Church for the first time, lost in a godforsaken small town,
the place to where I moved back two weeks ago; and the memories that have
been brought back to me by this record I'm listening to now.

After everything, now this?

Ever since I listened to them for the first time, I was fascinated, captured
by their music. At the time it was very different, but it's always had some
characteristics it has never lost, through the years and the changes. The
Church have changed in surprising, unimaginable ways since the beginnings;
and yet, in a sense, they never have, their music has kept an elusive
consistency. To me, it's the ability to evoke and to elude; it's the sadness
that lingers and yet never explodes, nor implodes; it's the ability to
accompany and never invade; it's a mirror that sends me back to some place
that I seem to have known without ever even having been there. It's dreamy,
but never easy, or simplistic.

Someone said that their music sound as if it was written in the 80's, but I
disagree strongly. What I think is that The Church ten years ago took a
direction that was bound to lead them very, very far away from what rock
music was to be.

Now that we're suffocated by a deluge of rock music that doesn't seem to
mean absolutely anything and that is terribily poor of any ideas (even old
ones, not to say new) but mindless rhythm, it's a comforting thought to know
that their music is still here with me.

Timely and yet, by now, timeless.