Church Car is a New York/Berlin duo comprising the enigmatic Big Daddy Mugglestone (Berlin) and avant-rock guitarist Ian Douglas-Moore (NYC), and Church Of is their debut album. It’s built almost like some kind of island-based role-playing game: each track introduces an entirely different landscape (and a whole new challenge to the listener: you feel that this is the sort of album you have to traverse, avoiding attacks from a horde of mechanised goblins, perhaps, or a sinister, sentient building). The pair constantly shuttle us between themes and moods (with a glut of instruments ranging from analogue synth to zither), but they do so with an almost languid expertise, and the journey never runs out of interest or incident: for an album that does lots of very different things, Church Of is remarkably coherent. Within the strange logic the duo have concocted, everything makes sense.
Opener Excise begins with field recordings: twitchy insect noise and a passing car. It’s an effective way of setting a scene and creating a sense of mystery, which will remain throughout the album. After a while, the noise coalesces into something noticeably percussive, and a discordant guitar twang begins to bridge the putative gap between sound art and melody-bound composition. A drone hovers in the rearview for a while, its presence seemingly doing the opposite of what a drone usually does: pulling focus, sharpening the senses. And then, in the track’s final third, a melodic, folky guitar motif kicks in. It challenges you to get to know the duo in an entirely different way. The sense of being in a game, or in one of those choose-your-own-adventure books, is strongest at these points, when the tense banter between genres, or between improvisational noise and structured melodicism, begins to play out in front of your eyes.
From this point on, each track claims its own identity and its own distinct place in some imaginary pantheon. Goat Studies is all grainy psych minimalism (imagine David Grubbs being indoctrinated into some kind of desert cult, while inscrutable voices natters in the background). The human (or nearly-human) voice becomes even more important on Incise, a strange and disorienting word-collage that attains a kind of poetry before fading into the urban soundscape.
By and large, Douglas-Moore brings the melodic moments and Mugglestone is responsible for the percussive elements (and therefore much of the album’s fidgetiness). The line is less clear on Big Daddy’s Waltz: its aggressive snare and feather-light guitar seem impossible to separate. This odd-couple sparring is palpable elsewhere too: in the brief, lithe, stop-start new wave jazz of Love Theme, for example. The closing title track sees both composers pull out their ample boxes of tricks. The guitar stabs, the drones, the minimal piano, the punchy post-rock drums are all there, but in a way that feels like it could all tip over into some glorious mess at any point. It drags you along for the ride, and that’s the joy of it: Church Of is music that puzzles and pinches and cajoles you along by any possible means, but it’s always headed towards something new and exciting.
Church Of (November 25th, 2025) Island House Recordings
Bandcamp: https://churchcar.bandcamp.com/album/church-of