"El Momento Descuidado" (a Spanish rendering of The Unguarded Moment) is the eighteenth album by the Australian psychedelic rock band The Church, released in November 2004. The album came just a month after the outtakes compilation Beside Yourself. For this project, the band chose to revisit past material in an all-acoustic format, along with five new songs. Notably, they decided to perform "The Unguarded Moment" once again, albeit in a heavily modified version, despite having distanced themselves from it for years. In reference to this song's reappearance, the band titled the album El Momento Descuidado, a rough Spanish translation of the original title.
Following the album's release, the band embarked on a short all-acoustic tour in late 2004. El Momento Descuidado was nominated for a 2005 ARIA Music Award for Best Adult Contemporary Album, although it lost to Oceans Apart by the Go-Betweens.
Critically, the album received praise for its "intimacy and intensity." James Christopher Monger of AllMusic highlighted the clarity achieved by the band in stripping down their sound, noting that while The Church had long made a career out of "dreamy, reverb-drenched landscapes," the reduction of these songs to their essence felt like both a triumph and a long-overdue step.
