According to The Simpsons, making religious pop music is as simple as replacing “baby” with “Jesus.” Local multimedia livetronic artists mega*church have taken this approach a step further by inserting their whole aesthetic into this equation and making some of the most epic dance music to currently grace this city.
As the name implies, mega*church takes a great deal of influence from the way large, suburban Pentecostal and Evangelical churches present media to their congregations. And replicating the energy of a passionate sermon is only half of what mega*church accomplish in their live shows.
Their shows offer a postmodern update on the constant intermingling of secular and religious music. As contemporary religious music moves from scripturally-based hymns towards more simple assertions of God’s love accompanied by larger than life images, mega*church mimics the spectacle, slipping in booming loops of “mega*church loves you” (among other slogans) between songs. Though this sounds like an awkward and slightly blasphemous pretext on paper, it produces an appropriately religious fervor on the dance floor. Vivid collages of religious and commercial imagery and text are edited together and displayed on a number of screens, while the five band members pound out pop hymns on guitars, bass, drums and a variety of vintage keyboards and other electronics.
Much of the visuals, and some of the sounds, recall The Flaming Lips, except with more purpose to match its ambition.
A more appropriate but less recognizable stylistic predecessor would be the collaboration between David Byrne and producer Brain Eno on the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which relies heavily on samples of religious music from various disparate faiths united by electronic beats. Mega*church uses a diverse array of samples as well. Sweet piano arpeggios lead into meditative synth drones, which could at any point swell into an organ-driven chorus or drop into pounding 808 breaks.
The band currently has little recorded output and are not associated with a record label. Three songs and three videos on their MySpace page are all they have presently made available.
None are quite indicative of their boundary-pushing live show, and hopefully when they do make a release it will be capable of matching their live output. In the meantime, keep an eye on their seizure-inducing Web site (www.megachurchlovesyou.org), a brilliant work of lo-res surrealism in itself, for updates on their next live appearance.