#JUST THE TWO OF US YOU AND I FULL#
The single is the crowning moment on a self-titled debut album full of snotty gutter punk that gained a slow but steady following until it achieved platinum status nearly a decade after being released. Has anything so ugly ever been this catchy? Piggybacking on one of the more unforgettable riffs in rock history, the equally memorable chorus of the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun" throws Gordon Gano’s un-redemptive sneer into whining, yelping overdrive. See also: Modern English: " I Melt With You" / Simple Minds: "Don't You (Forget About Me)" If it took a small fortune to make this one just right, so be it. Moments this powerful and unexpected don’t come along often.
Even after hundreds of spins, it still sounds surprising every time.
It barrels through the song, usurping and uplifting it, then driving it to a redemptive close. Midway through "Under the Milky Way", a slow-burning bit of psychedelia built, like most of the band’s best tracks, around the melancholic wonder in singer Steve Kilbey's voice, the song gives way to an insurgent guitar solo synthesized to sound like bagpipes. There is one moment, however, where its invisible production budget reveals itself, and it's the finest of the band's career. Starfish was the Church’s most straightforward record of the era, and mostly it lets the songs speak for themselves. Starfish became the band's best-selling album, but the group has long maintained they could have recorded a better one for a fraction of the price. "It got so out of control with the egos and the drugs and too much money." "We all had to have our special cars and apartments," guitarist Marty Wilson-Piper marveled 20 years later.
Those sessions paired them, uncomfortably, with veteran producers Waddy Watchel and Greg Ladanyi, old-guard industry hands who spent their career recording with acts like Fleetwood Mac, Warren Zevon, and Keith Richards, and who weren't shy about tapping Arista's generous expense account. The Church had already had a taste of the major-label system when they signed to Arista in the late '80s, but it wasn't until they recorded their 1988 album Starfish in Los Angeles that they fully witnessed the excesses of the music industry.
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