Seance

By 1983’s Seance, The Church were masters of the introverted pop song. The inescapable power pop (“Electric Lash,” “One Day”), widescreen rock (“Dropping Names”), and folky ways (“Disappear”) all feature jangled-up riffs and somnolent lyrical turns, so comparisons to Syd Barrett, The Byrds, and solo Gene Clark are easy. But songwriter/frontman Steve Kilbey, who sounds fetchingly at times like Jim Carroll and John Foxx tracked together, is a total original. And guitarists Peter Koppes and Marty Wilson-Piper play like best buds in the schoolyard sandbox, making new impressions of familiar chords and textures, so The Church whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There isn’t a song here that doesn’t work its weird magic over the test of time. Seance and the two earlier Church albums (1980’s Of Skins and Heart and 1982’s The Blurred Crusade) didn’t sell much in the early '80s; the band finally hit commercial paydirt on 1988’s Starfish. But these early albums left wide impressions years later (influencing, for example, million-selling songwriters such as Doug Hopkins, the man behind The Gin Blossoms).