79 minutes, 10 seconds

PAL
Retro

Televangelists are an easy target, and bands have been sampling their overheated speechifying since the days of Front 242's "Welcome to Paradise," and probably before. This compilation of rare tracks from PAL opens with an extended intro featuring a preacher (the same one who ranted about Jonestown to chilling effect on Phallus Dei's Pontifex Maximus CD) complaining that "we got time for wedding showers but no time to pray." The sermon goes on for longer than you'd expect--several minutes, with no accompaniment--and yet your attention doesn't wander.

When I was in college, I remember there was a preacher who used to practice his craft at a small amphitheater on campus. You'd walk by him practically every day, rain or shine, and he'd hold (imaginary) court there on the grass, hair shellacked, hands holding the lapels of his three-piece suit. He'd do the whole fire-and-brimstone thing, about how we were all going to hell unless we accepted Jesus Christ as our lord and savior. Handfuls of students would sit for a few minutes on the amphitheater steps and listen to him, or just heckle him, but he never paid them any attention. Just kept on preaching, sometimes quietly, other times more passionately. It was as if he were rehearsing the crescendoes and cadences of preaching that he'd learned by watching guys like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker on TV. He was like Robert De Niro in The King of Comedy, pretending he had a church and a large, rapt congregation.

And in a way he did. I thought he was a very compelling and charismatic speaker, and sometimes I'd find myself sitting there for 30 minutes at a time before realizing I was late for class. He had a grand theatricality to him that was sort of made tragic by the fact that he was reduced to sweating out the Virginia heat by exhorting a bunch of atheist students to get religion.

All this is just a long-winded way of explaining that I'm a sucker for a good sample from an evangelist preacher. There are lots of other good, original samples on Retro, but this one on the intro is the best. PAL also pays homage to Phallus Dei by sampling a snippet from one of the other tracks on Pontifex Maximus, a sly way perhaps of acknowledging where the inspiration to quote the preacher came from.

Bonus question: I've heard competing theories about the identity of the preacher being quoted. Is it Farrell Griswold (he's allegedly the guy on Front 242's "Welcome to Paradise"), is it Jimmy Swaggart, or is it someone else?

Also today:

79:07 The Unquiet Void, The Shadow-Haunted Outside
78:54 Current 93, Thunder Perfect Mind (CD 1 of 2)