Something Quite Peculiar

What makes enigmatic music enigmatic

One in a series that we'll have to see how it works out

I must've come home late after a night of goofing off with my friends. There were a lot of late nights goofing off with my friends. Not yet ready for sleep, I flipped on the television and put on USA Network's Night Flight, an eclectic collection of short films, music videos, and cheesy old movies, all tied together by some cool (for the time) graphics depicting an aerial view of a nocturnal urban scene. On this early spring night in 1988, it was mostly music videos. The presenter was over the moon about a new (to her) Australian band who were sure to be the Next Big Thing. 

Just four bars into the intro I found myself sharing in the presenter's enthusiasm. The key of A minor, but with a modal feel, an E minor seventh chord for the dominant rather than the more conventional E7. A bass line that never seemed to want to settle into root position. An unassuming vocal in a comfortable male range somewhere between a baritone and a tenor, more observing and commenting than singing, delivering lyrics that at first feel accessible and yet hint at a meaning that you just can't quite pin down. The video, with its minimalistic production, mostly depicts the band performing the song. The color palate is in shades of blue. The lighting shimmers. Soft blurs and camera filters never quite give the viewer a chance to take it all in, as if you're seeing something from a dream. Pin pricks in the backdrop allow points of light through, giving the impression of the band playing in front of a star field, a  sort of visual title drop.

I never got around to spending my limited budget for purchasing recordings on Starfish, or any other of The Church's albums, but today "Under the Milky Way" occupies a special place on one of my favorite playlists. Driving alone in the car, I'll unashamedly sing along, often taking the high harmony on the hook. Thirty-five years later, the song still holds the same mysterious and ineffable beauty as it did on that spring night.

The spring semester of 1988 was the latter half of my second year of university. The years spent in university, especially the first couple years, are for anyone a time of rapid intellectual and personal growth. It can be hard to keep up with it all. There's so much—contemporaneously and in memories—that seems to be just beyond one's comprehension, like that word that's on the tip of your tongue that you just can't think of. Seemingly everything about those years sort of hangs at the edge of one's consciousness, in the same way as a lightly instrumented minor-key song with the soft blurred video. 

The exuberance of a long forgotten late-night TV presenter notwithstanding, The Church didn't quite turn out to be the next big thing, but neither would it be accurate to think of them as one hit wonders. They found a following as an indie band and continue to record and perform to this day. The university years came and went and while life, as the saying goes, comes at you fast, there's something uniquely accelerated about those first tentative steps into one's adulthood. For those of us who took those steps in the late '80s, that video seen in the wee small hours of a Saturday morning so long ago provided the auditory and visual companion to those years.