100 favourite songs: #92: "Under The Milky Way" - The Church

… a shimmering, subtly layered, guitar-driven number which builds and then peters out, and builds again, and peters again, often all within the space of a single line, and is graced by an almost naff (but absolutely perfect) racing keyboard bridge which appears only once, midway through. It’s wonderfully, mysteriously evocative, and completely majestic in a fashion which derives much of its power from its sustained restraint, and there’s a real sense of yearning to Kilbey’s vocals, and of wonder, too, as he sings those enigmatic words: “Wish I knew what you were looking for,/Might have known what you would find…” - 21/11/02

I always think of this song and “Wide Open Road” as a pair and, like that other, I kind of feel like “Under The Milky Way” will never go away — that it’ll never cease to affect me at least in some measure in the way that it did when I took it most intensely to heart. Unsurprisingly, given its lyrical content (and the musical bed on which those vocals lie), I think of “Under The Milky Way” as one of the soundtracks to that time when I used to go for broody night-time walks around suburbia, gravitating to the open, grassy space of the green, where I’d sit or stand on a hill or a slope, looking up at the stars and clouds going around and past above me…

In its understated way, this song is a classic — there’s a magic to it which I can’t locate in any of the song’s constituent elements but which is all the more undeniable for that elusiveness.