The Final Sermon (Live in Japan 2019)

The Final Sermon (Live in Japan 2019) is a two-disc live album drawn from two nights at Club Citta in Kawasaki on the 2019 Damned If You Do tour. Rat Pak Records issued it on 26 July 2024 (RPR 816229), and the Japanese edition followed on Rubicon Music on 31 July. Kurdt Vanderhoof produced it. Those shows hold the last recording the singer Mike Howe made with Metal Church. Howe joined in 1988 and sang on Blessing in Disguise, The Human Factor and Hanging in the Balance, left, then returned in 2015 for XI and Damned If You Do; these two nights close that second spell. The first disc opens on ‘Damned If You Do’ and runs through ‘Fake Healer’, ‘In Mourning’, ‘Human Factor’, ‘Watch the Children Pray’, ‘Beyond the Black’ and ‘Badlands’ — fourteen songs, about seventy-nine minutes. The second adds ‘Agent Green’ and a ten-minute ‘Anthem to the Estranged’, then alternative studio mixes of ‘Killing Your Time’ and ‘Dead on the Vine’ and demos of ‘Needle and Suture’ and ‘Never Grow Old’, for twenty items in all.