After making a name as part of dream pop duo Exitmusic, Winnipeg-born, New York-based songwriter Devon Church has since turned to solo work. 2018 album We Are Inextricable and 2023 follow-up Strange Strangers developed a style as poetic as it is idiosyncratic, drawing on all manner of literary, political, spiritual and metaphysical ideas as inspiration. Taking its title from the Marx quote (“All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned”), Church’s third full-length All That’s Solid Melts Into Air is no different, employing the apocalyptic tones of Waits and Cohen at their darkest to explore the dangerous present. A world that feels unwell, with climate collapse, rising fascism, televised genocide and a whole manner of other symptoms racking a planet in the vice grip of whatever stage of capitalism we’ve passed into now.
No one track can capture the essence of a record so far-reaching in theme and style, but the album opener and title track is as good an introduction as any. A song delivered as though from the ground within this bleak moment, matching stark Biblical imagery with the tenderness of personal love. One “about staying true to the ones you love while the world falls apart,” as J.J. Snowden’s album notes describe, “a woozy synth and CR78 anthem, desecrated by fuzzed out guitars that recall the VU and Eno’s ‘Needle in the Camel’s Eye’.” The result captures the strange contradiction of living through a calamitous time, where the apparently inevitable end cannot preclude the persistent hope that there might be a path out of the mire, another way of living which allows the future room to breathe once again.
I see them coming,
I hear the riders
I see the pale horse’s nostrils flare
blue angels’ trumpets
the brass is shining in the sun
and all that’s solid melts into air
Watch the visualizer made by Jared Van Fleet below:
All That’s Solid Melts Into Air will be released on the 7th November and you can pre-order it from the Devon Church Bandcamp page.
