THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Whole empires rise and fall within the songs of Devon Church. On his latest album The Shame Of Winnipeg, Church cajoles and consoles us in the “immaculate decay” of late stage capitalism: “Come back to bed, baby, call in sick,” he beckons, “I see no use in making rich people richer.” In mixing the sacred and the profane, Church manages to make the profane sacred.
The 10 songs that make up The Shame Of Winnipeg find us chatting with Angela Davis in winged sandals, studying with Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa, ordering coffee from the Devil at a rural Tim Hortons. Between back-breaking work shifts, we cycle through video games, hospital rooms, the Garden Of Eden — ”revolution, rotation,” where “nothing happens for decades, then weeks when decades happen.”
What makes The Shame Of Winnipeg such a radical piece of art is that it eschews all the modern trappings of political records, from the cliched “we-live-in-a-society” statements of individual malaise, to the prescriptive “joy-as-resistance.” Instead, Church opts for a systemic and critical analysis of how the hell exactly we got here. After all, in what other timeline can you get from Fred Hampton to Britney Spears to Sonic The Hedgehog, other than the very real dystopian one we live in?
Just as striking is the sonic world that Church creates for us. While his lyrical insight suggests he’d be a natural fit at a Frankfurt School philosophy roundtable, you could just as easily imagine him behind the board in the control room for Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows or Blackstar-era David Bowie. Church produced and mixed the record himself, as well as recording nearly all the parts (with some excellent contributions from Stephen Becker, Alexia Avina, Jackie West, Katy Pinke, Nico Osborne, Mike Gebhart and Ada Roth). Church can croon like Scott Walker, and play guitar like Vini Reilly (Durutti Column), but the resulting sound is all his own.
Beneath the rubble of capitalism’s moral atrophy, Church retains a deep sense of compassion and desire for connection. Love takes on many forms through The Shame of Winnipeg; “a dirty joke,” “a fallacy,” an “educated guess.” In fact, it’s what wakes Church up, what makes him cry, and most crucially of all, what keeps him surviving: “It’s the only true concept to the heart of the Earth.” Though the record begins with us crushed under the grind of modern toil, The Shame Of Winnipeg reminds us that “intending to be human we are almost infinite.”