In the US, the Australian four-piece The Church were a one-shot deal. They had a moderate hit in 1986 with “Under the Milky Way,” sold a few copies of the accompanying album, Starfish, and then essentially vanished from the collective consciousness, except for that bit of it that insists on buying “Dude! Weren’t the ’80s Awesome?! vol. 14″ compilations.

But to consider this the band’s entire legacy is to sell The Church awfully short. Oblivious to the whims of musical fashion and favor, they simply continued to make one beautiful album after another. Their sound has always been unmistakable: layers on layers of sparkling, reverb-heavy guitars from six-string wizards Peter Koppes and Marty Wilson-Piper, topped by bassist Steve Kilbey’s laconic baritone and oblique lyrics. It’s a style that owes something to early R.E.M., as well as to The Byrds and the more psychedelic moments of The Beatles, but without really sounding like any of those bands. Despite the sheets of guitar that drape each album, there’s a nagging openness and loneliness to The Church’s music; you can almost hear the stark, desolate landscape of Australia’s interior hiding in the corners of every song.

Priest = Aura is both The Church’s most magical album and possibly their darkest. The opening number, “Aura,” is a perfect example. Over a eerie wall of guitars and synths, Kilbey narrates an opaque story about a soldier who comes home, is captured, and escapes, before breaking off into a long, long list of seemingly opposite things that somehow equal each other. “You equals me / The land equals the sea / Richer equals poorer / And priest equals aura,” he concludes ominously. What does it mean? I’m not exactly sure, but it’s got an incantatory power, like listening to some kind of formal occult ceremony conducted in a foreign language. The words themselves may be obscure, but there’s no denying the feeling that they create.

The rest of the album proceeds in like fashion. There’s an undercurrent of menace to the subtly textured music; it never fully rises to the surface, but there’s a sense in which that makes it all the more unnerving. As any horror movie fan knows, things are the most frightening when you can’t see them. Priest = Aura is a brooding, introspective album, and although it pays careful attention to melody, it rarely bothers to give you singalong choruses — and when it does, you almost wish it hadn’t (as on the barroom chant on “The Disillusionist” of “They say that he’s famous from the waist down / But the top half of his body is a corpse”). Although it’s by no means experimental or avant-garde, this is music that requires work to listen to. However, it richly and amply rewards any effort the listener puts in.

In retrospect, it’s not very surprising that Priest = Aura wasn’t much of a success for the band, who actually broke up for a few years after its release. The failure of their previous album, Gold Afternoon Fix, had destroyed any momentum that the success of Starfish had given them, and though it’s easy to guess that the most accessible moments on Priest = Aura might have been hits four or five years previously (the soaring “Kings” would have been my choice for a single), by the time of this album’s release, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were dominating the charts, and there really wasn’t a commercial outlet anymore for the kind of music The Church were recording.

But for all that, Priest = Aura is a remarkable achievement, a quietly brilliant album both as indirect and as evocative as its cryptic cover. It’s an album that I love more every time I play it, because it’s always got something new for me, no matter how many times I hear it.

Release date: Mar. 10, 1992
Label: Arista
Rating: 10/10

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