The Church -- "Under the Milky Way"
Not my favorite song on Starfish -- the only Church album I still have in my collection -- but it's the one that, in the summer of 1988, changed my life. I was raised on classic rock, and, thanks to an adventurous program manager who tossed this into the otherwise pretty standard rock rotation of Kansas City's KY-102, this was the first thing I heard that busted me loose from that frame of reference. I was 15 at the time.
The older I got, the more I realized that The Church was pretty goofy, with song lyrics that took themselves too seriously and, after this album, plunged deeper and deeper into the nonsensical. But there's still something powerful about this album for me, and it's still worth the occasional listen. It's more than just nostalgia. I'm still not quite sure what I'm hearing in that instrumental break: a bagpipe and some backwards guitar loops, I think. Other songs by The Church make the most of echo and delay, but here they keep it mostly acoustic. Here's a band that knew how to get a lot of atmosphere from a well-placed minor chord.
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