The Chills - Kaleidoscope World Album Review
A few months ago we took a trip out of Contact Towers to the big city (Which to us is Leeds, by the way), the purpose of which being to take in The Chills playing at the rather swish Belgrave Music Hall. Touring Silver Bullets, their first album of new material in nearly twenty years, the quintet - including the splendidly deranged sticksman Todd Knudson - arrived on stage to be confronted by an audience of no more than fourty, hard going for a band who'd played Primavera the previous Saturday evening.
And yet in a strange way the course of events was almost fitting. The Chills after all spent decades snatching defeat from the jaws of musical victory, passing on the opportunity of global recognition after their 1990 album Submarine Bells and it's soulful masterpiece of single Heavenly Pop Hit, a career dogged by personal tragedies, break ups, illness and other less savoury, career blunting enervations. Not that any artist deserves to have little recognition for their work (Ok, we can think of a few), but the veterans from the New Zealand town of Dunedin - of which they were the centrepiece of a movement known as the Dunedin Sound - have successfully negotiated so many rights of passage to date that this was nothing a word in the promoter's ear later couldn't get them over.
Kaleidoscope World reveals a band less sophisticated than the one which turned Submarine Bells into an almost hit, less orientated around the environmental crisis which even nearly thirty years ago was upon the planet, instead it's demons are more personal in nature . Originally released as an eight track compilation in early 1986, it seems to grow in scope each time it's revisited, the song roster now boasting three times that number, the latest additions secreted from the band's copious Smorgasbord of EP's, out-takes and found recordings.
Continue reading: The Chills - Kaleidoscope World Album Review