’80s-inspired Christian-inflected pop

You’d have to go back to the 1980s to find an album like the latest by Fine China, I Felt Called. Swirling with post–New Romantic indie pop as recollected through a dream-pop haze, it’s not only the band’s longest work (59 minutes, two LPs on vinyl) but also its best—and not exactly what you’d expect from the owner of a construction company who’s also a father of six, a grandfather of one, and a serious Christian.

Rob Withem has been Fine China’s guiding force ever since its inception in 1997. “Both sides of my family, for at least three or four generations back, were devout Christians,” he says. “I mean, you have times where you question things and your faith gets weathered and beat up, but it’s a huge part of my life. It’s the air that I breathe.”

Fine China made its earliest recordings, as well as its most recent, for Velvet Blue (home of Starflyer 59, Neon Horse, Ronnie Martin). In between, it recorded for Tooth & Nail and Common Wall. “The first six or seven years,” says Withem, “it was most of what I did.”

Then came love, marriage, babies, and carriages (and the construction company). Yet Fine China purred away throughout, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the fore, sometimes a little of both in the forms of EPs and singles.

Lately, it’s been more in the fore. Like many musicians, Withem found the pandemic ripe for getting busy in the studio, the immediate fruits of which were the ambient, New Age–leaning EP Trees at Night and the somewhat less ambient, less New Age–leaning album Eyes in the Water. “I just needed to get that stuff out of my system,” he jokes.

I Felt Called Fine China

I Felt Called has atmospheric elements too, but this time they’re more layered and shot through with the propulsive guest-drumming of the Rocky Valentines’ Charlie Martin. The album’s target audience might be anyone enamored of the Smiths and New Order, groups whom Withem considers two sides of the same ’80s coin (“the Smiths, super melancholy and guitar oriented; New Order, kind of dancey and peppy”) and whose influence he readily admits.

The album should also appeal to those who prefer their lyrics on the elliptical side. References to the golden calf (“Television Set”), not letting the sun go down on your wrath (“Fraught With Danger”), and a ’round-the-neck millstone (“Nightshade”) notwithstanding, the words often simply reflect where Withem sees himself these days. “I’m not mystical about songwriting,” he says. “I’m more like a carpenter.

“Somehow the lyrics take on a life of their own, and I kind of just let them do what they do.”