REVIEW: Chris Zurich — You’re My Church (SINGLE)
An unassumingly seductive guitar melody, seemingly presented to us from beneath a constrictive sonic blanket, greets us in the opening bars of Chris Zurich’s new single “You’re My Church” with the kind of hesitancy that can stop you from writing a letter to an old flame now abroad, but it’s this very hesitancy that both excites and entices us closer to what will become the song’s greatest attribute — its emotionality.
Zurich’s voice enters the fold after a moment, his presence introduced by the gentle string play and nothing more, and when he starts to sing it feels like there’s no one else on the planet other than artist and audience. “You’re My Church,” as its title would imply, compares love to a religion, and as much as I can identify with its lyrical content, the substance of its story isn’t defined wholly by the words its star voice is singing to us. Instead, this is a good example of what I often call the package deal in pop music; a singer who can get us on his emotional level with nothing more than tone backed by a poetic sensibility that could do as well on its own as it does beside a sweet soundtrack.
It isn’t until the eclectic, textured percussive pattern comes into focus that “You’re My Church” begins to ache like a rock ballad, but it never fully ascends to that electrifying, stage-owning state that makes a pop song much more guitar-oriented than it is singer-centric. One of the first things that connected me with this single was it’s dexterous straddling of the line between pop and rock, specifically with regards to its experimental progression, but I don’t want to call it an outright hybrid. There’s too much purity in this performer’s execution, too much attention to detail and, most of all, too much in this song indebted to a Beatles-like model for pop hooks for me to tether its aesthetics to those of an increasingly disheveled and inconsistent underground trend too frequently described as an arm of the new surrealism movement. Zurich is above the buzz words — he wants to make expressive pop, not mall music to get lost in.
“You’re My Church” isn’t the first song this artist has released to the enjoyment of indie critics around the country, nor do I think it’s going to be his last, but it’s definitely among his most significant releases to attract the affections of fans in the last two years he’s been on my radar. He’s grown up a lot just in the time that has passed since “Destinations” dropped, and if he remains on the artistic trajectory he’s on right now, I believe we’re going to see his music popping up in the mainstream more and more in the next couple of years. Chris Zurich is a very likable singer/songwriter with a honey-like voice when he’s in love with the verse, and it will be interesting to see what this current momentum brings him next.
Colin Jordan
