Country music is often regarded as a genre that moves in the slow lane, but Eric Church has never been one for obeying the speed limit. Just last year the North Carolina-born artist created a furore at Stagecoach – country music’s Coachella – when he skimped on his best-loved hits in favour of acoustic versions of rap songs by 2Pac and Snoop Dogg.
You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a 47-year-old Nashville veteran and 10-time Grammy nominee negotiate Snoop’s Gin & Juice (“Everything is fine when you listenin’ to the D-O-G”). Such was Church’s logic, at any rate, though his fans did not agree. Many left early, wondering if they had witnessed an act of self-sabotage or a bizarre stab at performance art. Church would later clarify that he “wanted to challenge himself” and “do something really weird” – a mission he accomplished.
Twelve months later he’s still taking risks, with a new album that has the discombobulating cyberpunk title of Evangeline vs the Machine and arrives with gleaming sci-fi artwork. Those are the limits of its excesses, however: the project clocks in at a trim eight tracks and a run time of just 36 minutes.
Yet, for all its economy, it raises a multitude of imponderables. Who is Evangeline, for instance, and what is the Machine? Church doesn’t answer these questions to any meaningful degree over the course of an LP that belies its futuristic framing and is free of science-fiction trappings.
Instead of spooking his audience all over again, it showcases Church’s expressive baritone and flair for beautifully arranged songs that revisit classic country themes such as heartache and the struggles of doing right in a cruel world. No babies are chucked out with the bathwater: Tupac Shakur fans will go home empty-handed.
The record’s theme is the relentless march of the years, as spelled out on the rumbling opening track, Hands of Time, which begins with a church organ and then leads into a dusky riff.
“Detroit built brakes so that they could make a Chevy slow down/ And a just-right midnight sorry might turn goodbye around,” Church croons, conjuring the United States’ faded auto industry as a metaphor for the decline we all experience in our lives. We’ve all got our own private Detroits, he suggests.
It’s a bleak beginning to a collection that shifts deeper into melancholy on I Bleed on Paper, where steel pedal combines with meditative lyrics. “May never be what you call a rock star – be cool if I don’t get there,” the arena headliner with an estimated net worth of $40 million declaims.
But lightning flickers amid the gloom. Storm in Their Blood is a gorgeous ballad on which, framed by sobbing strings, he conjures with the iconography of the American West (“Apache war-horse paint”) and interrogates his short temper: “most men seek love and peace – some are born with a storm in their blood.”
That storm is tempered with anxiety on Johnny, his soulful take on The Devil Went Down to Georgia, the 1979 track by Charlie Daniels Band. The original spins a hokey tale of the devil trying to win a young man’s soul by besting him in a fiddle-playing contest. Church repurposes it as a protest against gun violence and the trauma he felt, as the father of two young boys, after a 2023 school shooting in Nashville in which three nine-year-olds and three adults were killed.
It’s the searing high point of a record largely content to stay within the parameters of mainstream country music. Few sheep are frightened across a solid but never innovative LP. It will certainly appeal to Ireland’s huge country-music fan base, who could do with an early summer treat to put them in the mood for Zach Bryan’s shows at Phoenix Park in June.
Those concerts will surely be spectacular. And if Evangeline vs the Machine doesn’t have the same epic punch as the prospect of a vigil to Phoenix Park in praise of country music, it is nonetheless an agreeable addition to Church’s repertoire.
It will, in particular, come as a relief to fans who felt his future would be nothing but 2Pac covers and Snoop Dogg tributes. A singer with a talent for songs about the crookedness of the human heart is playing it straight.
