The Drama Of Alienation

Honest Don’s Hardly-Used Recordings, LP, CD, 1996

Lance (guitar/vocals), Gardner (bass), Reed (drums)

The fourth ‘proper’ J Church album. When it came out there was some criticism for it being on a ‘big corporate label’, but then, that was the time of the fallout from the Green Day / Offspring explosion. The fact that the lyric sheet included a ‘suggested reading list’ incorporating various anarchist and situationist tracts should have made the band’s intentions fairly clear.

A Simple Gesture was released on J Church’s other 1996 album, a compilation called Whorehouse: Songs And Stories, without the ‘A’ in the title. The tracks sound identical but if so it’s a puzzle why they ended up on different full-length records. On a similar note, when Dramatic History… was released as a single, it gained an initial ‘The’.

Backing vocals are credited to the Propaghandi Ouija Board Choir. Members of Propaghandi also played in the band during a 1995 tour of Japan when only Lance made it through immigration - a story later recounted in J Church Sucks.