I blindly love this album, Loveblind, The Maven, Eastern, Authority, Fly Home and The Dead Man's Dream are my favorites off SA. From Somewhere Else my favorite song is [see to the left;) ] (and most of the time is not only my favorite Church(?) song, but my all-time favorite song), and I'd sorely miss Cut in Two and The Myths You Made if I didn't have them. Someone mentioned before (around the 1st page of this thread) that Drought belongs to AQSAS more than to SE, sonically it does, but if I remember correctly from my readings this demo was lost for some time, and were it not for SE it may have never be released.
I have the impression that Business Woman could have been well received in some radio stations (a song that accommodated the music industry expectations after all:) ), and I dare suggest it would be great if Authority replaced at least one of many commercial crappy songs in soft-rock stations.

I entirely agree with Daniel, you should listen to it without pre-conceptions and expectations from the past. To be honest I wasn't familiar with all of The Church back catalogue then, so I didn't know what to expect, nor was looking for a specific "Church" sound when I heard these songs, and I just enjoyed (almost all of) them for themselves. It's great and bravely experimental IMO.

To me this is indeed an album by The Church, even if it's a Church reduced to a duo. I don't think that a description of its sound should be reduced to 'a combination of MWP and SK solo material'. Even though I'm not as familiar with MWP's or SK's solo work as many of you, I doubt that these songs could have come off without the two collaborating and feeling free to experiment. Some songs may sound more like SK or more like MWP (I now realize that Myths you Made sounds more like a MWP solo song, but I didn't know this for years until I got some of Marty's solo material) but to me none of these wongs wouldn't have existed as such if they had worked separately. Which leads to an interesting speculation: what if SK and MWP had taken each separately what they contributed to SA/SE and instead of collaborating developed it independently for solo albums? And in a related hypothetical situation, if MWP and SK made an album now without PK (The Counter-Refo:mation ? :b ) would it sound like the material from SA/SE?

Somewhere Else has a special place in my heart as "the album I tought I'd never have but that circumstances allowed me to get". I purchased my SA in Monterrey (import, no Mexican versions were edited after GAF I think), and it had a coupon for SE free, 'just send $1.25 in check or Money Order for S&H'. I loved SA and knew I had to hear SE, but I wouldn't have expected Arista to honor the offer internationally (and an international MO would have been significantly more expensive). Then in the summer of 1995 I was selected for a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship at Baylor University (Waco, TX), in my time there I sent the coupon and the money order. I was almost afraid that even then I wouldn't receive it since it had been a while since the album was released, and maybe the 25,000 limited edition copies would be gone by then (which shows how optimistically naive I was about The Church's success). The album didn't arrive before I had to go back to Mxico but a friend sent it to me. It was a great sensation to hear "new" Church music. And I've loved "The Time Being" since then.

One of the first Church albums I converted to MP3 to listen to from the computer in my office, and I play its songs frequently (except for Drought, ocasionally, and Macabre Tavern, almost never).
"Oh, I want life...I want to rise up, out of this chamber and clamber into the sky..."