

Circle Slide, the fifth and best record from the Orange County group The Choir, states its thesis in its opening lyric: “Imagine one perfect circle.” The line doesn’t seem especially profound until you start to unpack it. I’m relying on a memory of decades-old interviews here, but the lyric was reportedly inspired by something Steve Hindalong’s young daughter said to him when he took her to the playground one afternoon. After flying down the slide multiple times, she lamented that the ride was over too quickly, and that she wished there was a slide that just went around and around — a continual loop that she could ride forever. Hindalong took the idea and gracefully transformed it into a metaphor for heaven, a place where “lovers hide away, and children cheer.” His use of language is striking: in the song, images appear almost as mirages, gauzy and distant. The album’s opening moments are given over to fantasy: deep swirls of guitar, slow, druggy percussion, and lyricon winding slowly in the background like a searchlight across clouds. It’s like settling into a deep dream, where everything occurs in soft focus and the encouragement in the chorus — “Come on let’s ride the circle slide” — seems to take place in slow motion. It’s haunting and beautiful, like slipping into a warm bath, eyes closed, heart settled.



And then in the second verse, the carnival shuts down, and the fantasy collapses.

The Choir had dabbled in psychedelia before, but never had they submerged themselves as deeply as they do on Circle Slide. Growing up in the Bay Area, guitarist and vocalist Derri Daugherty would order psych albums from the Aquarius Records catalog, and at fleeting moments throughout their career they would come close to marrying the trademark mysticism of their lyrics with music that matched its mood. They succeeded in fits and starts on 1988’s Chase the Kangaroo, but then shifted hard in the opposite direction for 1989’s masterful Paisley Underground outing Wide-Eyed Wonder, a record whose roaring, R.E.M.-ish lead single “Someone to Hold On To” seemed designed to get their records out of Christian bookstores and into regular record racks once and for all. The Choir are part of what could loosely be considered alternative Christian music’s Big Four, the other three being Daniel Amos, The 77’s and Adam Again (vocalist Derri Daugherty would join the lead vocalists of those bands in supergroup The Lost Dogs in 1992). They mostly grew out of the same Southern California punk church ecosystem, and shared a commitment to using faith as a prism through which to write, rather than as a script treatment to be followed. (Hindalong and Daugherty were roadies for Daniel Amos, and were sitting in a tree watching when the group played a showcase for Curb Records executives.)

What made The Choir so alluring is the fact that they mostly focused on Christianity’s mystical aspects: their songs are full of spirits and ghosts, and drummer and primary lyricist Hindalong had a way of making even common issues like love and grief feel like they were taking place inside The Neverending Story. He’s often rightly praised as a lyricist, but what gets lost in those assessments is his light touch. He turns the absence of evil in heaven into a perfect storybook illustration: “The ground has melted where the devil stood.” On Circle Slide, the Choir abandoned conventional parameters, writing songs that stretched north of the 5-minute mark and opting for enveloping atmosphere over sharp, concise singles. The closest analogue would be Talk Talk’s shimmering Spirit of Eden — its opening track bears an almost uncanny resemblance to the first track on Circle Slide (Choir fans: Seriously. Listen to it.) — except that on Circle Slide, the Choir repeatedly, mercilessly, plummet back to earth.

After opening on the intangibility of heaven, Hindalong turns his attention to the physical: “Around my neck, against my heart/ I wear a wooden cross/ and sometimes I remember/ what freedom cost…/consider now the crimson crown the Man of Sorrows wore.” Over the course of the title track’s seven-and-a-half minutes, the band writes the template for the album in miniature: how nothing good, not heaven, not salvation, not eternal relief, comes without blood, pain or sacrifice.

After that opening benediction, the band returns their attentions to the physical. If Circle Slide initially seems like a meditation on the afterlife, the deeper into it you get, the more you realize its real subject is love, and Hindalong is both tender and unflinching in his depiction of it. Just as heaven cannot be attained without a measure of physical pain — in Christian theology, the death of Christ on the cross; in everyday life, actual physical death — love itself is a briar patch, and if there are flowers at the center of it, you can’t get to them without shedding a little blood. Nowhere is this more apparent than the suite of songs that comprise Circle Slide’s turbulent middle section. On the mournful “A Sentimental Song,” over guitars that ripple like the aurora borealis, Daugherty gives voice to Hindalong’s tender, almost arrestingly sincere offer of comfort to his wife, singing, “Hide with me tonight, love endures the weather/ in the morning, we will dance together/ let my song fall down around you.” The song perfectly illustrates the group’s strange chemistry: Hindalong, the drummer, wrote all the lyrics but Daugherty, the frontman, sings them; this would be less remarkable if Daugherty’s delivery weren’t so gentle and so deeply empathetic. His fragile, sugar-cane tenor is the perfect vehicle for Hindalong’s relentlessly unguarded verse.

This all comes into sharp relief in “About Love,” The Choir’s best, most honest and most brutal song, in which Hindalong manages to explore every terrifying crevice and invigorating peak of romance with the kind of plainspokenness you’d only dare if you were sure your audience was limited. Over a tumbling, delirious guitar line, Daugherty imbues Hindalong’s verse both aching romance and genuine malice. The song opens with Hindalong leaving his wife, presumably for tour, and Daugherty sounds appropriately distraught. But Hindalong mixes the imagery in a way that’s deliberately troubling: “So good to hurt so bad/ so sad to ride away renewed/ go on laugh, go on cry/ it’s alright.” As the song progresses, the conflicting emotions get sharper, more focused, until Hindalong calls home from the road with a bruising request that conflates the joy and resentment of parenthood in a way that makes The Babadook look restrained: “Please kiss the little bird/ God bless the cozy cage we share/ you kill me, you thrill me/ you threaten my dreams.” The song’s final line is ruthless in its emotional devastation: “There’s something wonderful about love/ there’s something liberating death alone brings/ there’s something funny about a lot of sad things/ There’s something wonderful about love.” Hindalong would be the first to admit the sentiment isn’t admirable, but there’s a stunning fearlessness in the way he attacks it.

Musically, the record is a hazy, enveloping marvel; guitars appear in weird, wavy sheets; Dan Michaels’ lyricon — always the group’s oddest ingredient — floats sorrowfully along in the background, a kind of audible manifestation of the Holy Spirit, grieving the pain that unfolds over the course of the album but powerless to stop it. The album ends with the thumping Stone-Roses-at-half-speed “Restore My Soul,” where Hindalong-via-Daugherty cries out for salvation as Mike Sauerbrey’s bass, sounding like a lost Tribe Called Quest loop, stalks from the shadows. “I cry to you with two eardrums blistered/ from laughing with preachers of night/ with my vertebrae twisted/ from dancing with creatures of night.” As it progresses, the song becomes more suffocating: guitars settle in like black smoke from a burning building, percussion rattles and becomes frantic and Daugherty’s mantra, “Restore my soul,” becomes more dead-eyed, more desolate. Throughout the song, Hindalong tactically destroys his body: his lungs explode, his tongue is gone, his spirit chokes. This is what it takes to reach paradise — both temporal and eternal — the systematic destruction of the self.

And this is Circle Slide’s great, canny feint: it comes on like a record about the joy of the afterlife, but in reality is a record about the here and now, about how pain is often a requirement of love, and about how we often hold conflicting impulses and emotions inside of us, and are forever trying to navigate the perilous road between them. It makes heaven the ultimate metaphor — for love, mostly, but also for life in general. It’s the idea that sacrifice is not only necessary, but that it is, and should be, painful. It takes the idea of a linear slide and upends it. It’s not a quick, brief ride that starts in anticipation and ends in elation — it’s all of those things on repeat, over and over, a neverending cycle of joy, fear, relief, anxiety, love, pain, grief and victory, as long as we all shall live and, possibly, even beyond that. The old adage says that good things come to those who wait. On Circle Slide, the good things come to those who bleed.



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