{"id":900170,"date":"2026-09-18T07:34:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T07:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/900170\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T07:34:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T07:34:11","slug":"albums-of-the-week-devon-church-the-shame-of-winnipeg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/900170\/","title":{"rendered":"Albums Of The Week: Devon Church | The Shame Of Winnipeg"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: \u201cWhole 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 \u201cimmaculate decay\u201d of late stage capitalism: \u201cCome back to bed, baby, call in sick,\u201d he beckons, \u201cI see no use in making rich people richer.\u201d In mixing the sacred and the profane, Church manages to make the profane sacred.<\/p>\n

The 10 songs that make up The Shame Of Winnipeg find us chatting with Angela Davis in winged sandals, studying with Tibetan Buddhist master Ch\u00f6gyam 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 \u2014 \u201drevolution, rotation,\u201d where \u201cnothing happens for decades, then weeks when decades happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cwe-live-in-a-society\u201d statements of individual malaise, to the prescriptive \u201cjoy-as-resistance.\u201d 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?<\/p>\n

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Just as striking is the sonic world that Church creates for us. While his lyrical insight suggests he\u2019d 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\u2019s Everybody Knows\u00a0or 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\u00a0and Ada Roth). Church can croon like Scott Walker, and play guitar like Vini Reilly (Durutti Column), but the resulting sound is all his own.<\/p>\n

Beneath the rubble of capitalism\u2019s moral atrophy, Church retains a deep sense of compassion and desire for connection. Love takes on many forms through The Shame of Winnipeg; \u201ca dirty joke,\u201d \u201ca fallacy,\u201d an \u201ceducated guess.\u201d In fact, it\u2019s what wakes Church up, what makes him cry, and most crucially of all, what keeps him surviving: \u201cIt\u2019s the only true concept to the heart of the Earth.\u201d Though the record begins with us crushed under the grind of modern toil, The Shame Of Winnipeg reminds us that \u201cintending to be human we are almost infinite.\u201d<\/p>\n

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