Lords Prayer II

AMG Review of Lords Prayer II

Dave Thompson
All Music Guide

The band's 2002 resurrection notwithstanding, there has been precious little action on the Lords of the New Church front since the band's late '80s dissolution, and the death of frontman Stiv Bators a year later. Only the Killer Lords CD collection, with its bountiful round-up of B-sides and hits, serves as a truly representative one-stop introduction to this most dynamic of post-punk behemoths' output, and, if there's one point to make about Lords Prayer II, it's that it could just as easily have been titled "More Killer Lords." It's that good. Whereas Lords Prayer simply reprised a pair of mid- to late-'80s live shows, II goes for the band's studio output from the same period. The first seven tracks, including a revamped "Dance With Me" and great covers of the Creation's "Making Time" and Rufus Thomas' "Walking the Dog," delve into the handful of super-scarce singles the band issued in Germany and France toward the end of their career; another, "Mr MX7," is drawn from the soundtrack of the Tapeheads movie; and all catch the band pursuing its widescreen punky dance-rock vision without a care for their plummeting U.K./U.S. renown -- remember, by the time these tracks were recorded, two years had passed since the Lords' last album (1984's Method to Our Madness), and most English-speaking observers regarded them as a dead issue. Not so. The absence of any firm recording information does hamper the album somewhat, although three of the five remaining studio tracks -- unreleased one and all -- certainly seem to date from much the same period. The exceptions would be "Wine, Women and Song," a number which guitarist Brian James was performing with his Brains and Hellions outfits a year or so before the Lords came into being, and "New Victorians," which just feels like one of the band's earliest efforts, and is titled for one of the names being bandied about before Bators and James hatched the Lords. Lords Prayer II winds up with a speeding live version of "Route 66," drawn from one of the shows featured on the first volume; the first 5,000 copies then continue on with a bonus disc dating from the Lords' first American tour in 1982, and featuring the early in-concert favorites "Fortune Teller" and "Girls Girls Girls," alongside the band's debut album in its entirety. It's a fabulous show, a reminder of just how much hope was once laid at the Lords' door -- and how it was the audience, not them, who caused it to be abandoned.