Devon Church
Strange Strangers
FELTE
In 2012, NYC-based duo Exitmusic released one of the most remarkable and yet under-the-radar albums of at least the last two decades. That’s no exaggeration—the husband-and-wife duo of Aleksa Palladino and Devon Church channeled something truly mysterious, otherworldly, and celestial on that record that felt like an ascent to heaven, even (or perhaps especially) if heaven doesn’t exist. Its follow-up took a long time—it wasn’t until 2018 that The Recognitions emerged from our o’erhanging firmament, no doubt due to Palladino becoming well-known as an actress, and because the pair divorced in 2015.
Strange Strangers, the name of Church’s sophomore solo LP, is a title taken from the following quote by radical eco-philosopher Timothy Morton: “The strangeness of strange strangers is itself strange, meaning the more we know about an entity the stranger it becomes.” The idea refers to non-human entities that can never be fully comprehended, but through these songs it seems to also refer to humans and relationships. After all, how well do we ever know someone? How much of someone—whether a relative, a love, a friend—is it ever possible to know?
This album doesn’t answer those questions, not least because they’re unanswerable. After all, everybody has a different perception of you, even if you believe yourself to be an unwavering version of yourself throughout your life. What this record does do, however, is make you ponder the very nature of existence on both a macro and micro level, the pointlessness and worthwhileness of living, the highs and lows, loves and losses.
It’s all filtered through Church’s sad, somber, gravelly voice, which falls somewhere between The National’s Matt Berninger, Matthew Ryan, and the late Mark Lanegan. It makes these songs feel much more grounded, more earthed and earthy, than anything Exitmusic did, even though they’re littered with Biblical references. It’s the voice of God channeled through a fucked up preacher’s sermon rather than the voice of God itself. There’s no proselytizing, just using the language of religion as a metaphor for life on Earth, much in the same way Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits have all summoned the spiritual in their songs.
That’s just what Church (and what an appropriate last name) does here. Opener “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” follows the lead of its title, albeit with a slightly loungey feeling. It’s an intriguing mix between the secular and spectral, positioning this record as one about the world, though also removed from it. That’s immediately confirmed by the appropriately Cohen-esque second song, “This Is Paradise (But Not for Us),” on which Church, singing from the point of view of Adam, proclaims: “Eve and I we’re getting bored / First we die and then we’re born.” Later, he delivers one of the wittiest lyrics you’re likely to hear all year: “Jesus was a genius but I prefer his early stuff / No one talks that much about carpentry these days.”
Elsewhere, “All Is Holy (A432)” revels in emptiness, in godlessness, in love and loss and lacunae, its title referencing an alternative tuning that’s (apparently) mathematically consistent with the patterns of the universe. Then there are the electronic layers of “Flash of Lightning in a Clear Blue Sky,” which are reminiscent of Exitmusic, and the delightful plod and drunken slur of “Ephemera,” which whittles down the essence of life to its bare essentials in just under four minutes, as well as the Spiritualized-esque magnificence of “Winter’s Come,” which ponders on—among other things—just how long those we’ve loved linger in our hearts and brains after they’ve gone.
It’s a truly profound and moving piece of work, an album that exists in the past, the present, and future. And perhaps, after all, it does answer those questions, precisely by not answering them. Because in the end, they’re just left hanging in the air of “Deer Park,” the brief instrumental that closes this record in a wash of beautiful, supernal melody that briefly escapes the void before it’s blown away by the wind—like a ghost, like life—and becomes the void once more.
