LIVE REVIEW + PHOTOS: The Church in Somerville, MA (06.25.26)
I’ll be honest, I’ve walked past the Somerville Theatre more times than I can count and never once thought about seeing a concert there. In my head, it’s always been a movie cinema, the kind that still runs 35mm prints and has Terminator 2 coming up on the calendar, which tells you everything you need to know about their programming. So when I found out The Church were playing there, I had to recalibrate a little. Turns out the room works. Seats on the ground floor and the balcony, maybe a handful empty by the time things got going ten minutes late, which nobody seemed to mind much.
A fan I ended up talking to before the show had seen The Church fifty times. Fifty. He said it matter-of-factly, the way you say something when it stopped feeling remarkable to you years ago. I didn’t doubt him for a second. You could tell.
That’s the thing about this band, and I say this as someone who came in knowing a little but not a lot. They exist in this pocket where the people who know them really know them, and most everyone else has just never quite found their way in, which is a strange place to occupy for a band that’s been making records since 1980.
They opened with “Columbus,” and it set the tone immediately, unhurried, atmospheric, the kind of song that doesn’t announce itself so much as it arrives. “Electric Lash” followed, with more edge, and then “Tear It All Away,” which pushed harder still. By the third song, you had a sense of the range they were working with. This wasn’t a band running through the hits in order of familiarity. They were building something. I did love Steve asking if people were here for the singles, and when people replied with a roaring yes, he called them ‘shallow’!
“The Hypnogogue” came next, pulled from their most recent record, and it held up comfortably in the company of older material, which isn’t always the case when bands sequence new songs against their catalog. Then, “The Unguarded Moment,” one of the earliest things they ever released, and the room responded to it the way rooms respond to songs that have been with people for decades. Not nostalgia exactly. More like recognition.
But what made the night genuinely different from most shows I’ve shot was Steve Kilbey. Between nearly every song, he talked. Not filler, not thanking the city, not “this next one is off our third record,” actual stories. About writing the songs, about what the band was going through when they made them, about the strange and specific situations that produce music. He talked about playing towns where the crowd only wanted the one song they knew, and the particular satisfaction of not giving it to them. He talked about UFOs in the woods, which he delivered completely straight-faced. He talked about early shows where the press had built them up so high that walking onstage felt like being handed something impossible to live up to. Every story landed. He’s as comfortable talking as he is singing, which is not something you can say about most people who do this for a living.
“Block” and “Metropolis” moved through that middle stretch of the first set with a kind of locked-in momentum, and “It’s No Reason” and “Realm of Minor Angels” brought things somewhere quieter and stranger before the set closed. The sequencing trusted the audience, which the audience deserved.
And then, just before the break, “Reptile, “I didn’t expect to hear that one. It’s one of those songs that sits in the back of your mind as something you know exists but never quite imagined in a room with you. When it started, something changed. Not that the crowd had been disengaged before, but this was a register entirely different. People who had been sitting still were suddenly not. The song has a pull to it that’s hard to explain if you haven’t heard it, something coiled and inevitable about the way it moves, and the room gave itself over to it completely.
Set two opened with “Almost With You” and “When You Were Mine,” both landing with the kind of ease that comes from songs that have been played hundreds of times but haven’t gone stiff from it. “Ripple” and “Western” pushed into darker, more atmospheric territory. This is a band that clearly has no interest in keeping things bright, and “Destination” and “Constant in Opal” carried that mood forward without ever making the night feel like it was losing energy. It wasn’t. It was just going somewhere specific.
“Another Century” and “Already Yesterday” brought things toward the close, and by that point the shape of the whole evening was clear. Fourteen albums, career-spanning, held together not just by the songs but by Kilbey’s narration threading through all of it, the stories giving context to the music and the music giving weight to the stories.
But what I’d been waiting for, if I’m being honest, was “Under the Milky Way.” It came near the end, and it earned its place there completely. It’s one of those songs a lot of people have heard without knowing who made it, without ever having followed the thread back to where it came from. Hearing it live, in a theatre built for exactly this kind of moment, with an audience that knew every single word, was something else. The room went quiet in that particular way where quiet is actually the loudest thing happening.
Photos – The Church at Somerville Theatre in Somerville, MA on June 25th:
