My Top 1000 Songs #966: Under The Milky Way

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Australian alt.rockers The Church are one of those bands I know I should spend more time with, but I kinda missed them the first time around, and by the time I got around to picking up a bunch of their records, it felt like the time had passed. But I do like that run of 80s records, blending college radio jangle with Cure-like goth-pop and maybe a touch of dreamy psychedelia.

Still, even if they remain one of the more underplayed bands in my collection, despite constant pledges to myself that I'm gonna give them another go, "Under The Milky Way" is pretty damn undeniable. The break-out single from their 5th album, 1988's Starfish, is damn near perfect, gorgeous and a little spooky, milking that Cure and Love And Rockets radio-friendly dark vibe but with jangles aplenty. The sort of thing that comes out of the radio and feels just a little different and world-building. Maybe it got just a little too big, enough pop culture saturation to make it too much of a "hit" to feel truly intimate (but, hey, some of those cover versions are pretty great), but divorced from that it's got a certain inescapable magic.

Live 2011:

Rogue Wave cover:

Metric cover:

Lilly Hiatt cover:

And yes, even Rick Springfield!