David Kilgour - Bobbie's a girl (2019)

Both on his own and with his band the Heavy Eights, David Kilgour built up a strong CV of chiming, noisy, and sometimes thickly psychedelic indie rock since the Clean stopped recording (for a while) in the early '90s. On records like 1994's Sugar Mouth or 2004's Frozen Orange, right up to 2014's End Times Undone, he's made thoughtful, tuneful albums that chime warmly as his understated vocals deliver a big, soft punch. It's a formula that has served him well for a long time, but on 2019's Bobbie's a Girl, Kilgour and his band change things up. For one thing, it's mostly an instrumental album, with Tony De Raad and Kilgour's acoustic and electric guitars carrying the main melodic weight, Thomas Bell's bass and Taane Tokona's drums subtly shading the background, and an array of carefully placed keyboards coloring in spaces here and there. A majority of the songs are meditative and inward-looking while still being darkly compelling. "Entrance" sets the scene like a cloud settling in overhead, and many of the songs follow suit. Sprinkled in among the pretty, wordless ballads ("Coming in from Nowhere Now"), dramatic Bad Seeds-esque laments ("Swan Loop"), and off-kilter noise-blues jams ("Ngapara") are occasional pop songs like the sweetly soaring "Smoke You Right Out of Here" and "Looks Like I’m Running Out," which spits out shards of pain in fragments of electric guitar then attempts to heal the damage with reassuring vibraphone runs.

It's no surprise that the album's tone is extra thoughtful and a little sad at times, since it's inspired and shaped by the death of Kilgour's mother as well as his longtime mate Peter Gutteridge. The band took their time making the music and creating the right feel, and the heartbreaking results show that their efforts were well worth it. Along the way, Kilgour realized that jettisoning the words allowed the interplay of the instruments to conjure up the exact feeling of loss and melancholy that he was looking for without language getting in the way. That choice makes the album a little less accessible on first listen, but once the music takes hold, it sinks in deeply. Though it is something of an outlier, at its core, Bobbie's a Girl is just like the other albums Kilgour has made over his long career: lovely pop music powered by his knack for crafting songs that feel like snippets from real life.

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Pop Art Toasters - Pop Art Toasters (1994)

With neither of their bands touring, or in the recording studio, New Zealand music scene veterans Martin Phillipps (guitar/vocals) of The Chills and David Kilgour (guitar/vocals) of The Clean,  bassist Noel Ward, keyboardist Alan Starrett and drummer Noel Ward joined forces to create perhaps the closest thing to a “super group” that New Zealand ever had, the one off group, Pop Art Toasters. Released in 1994 the group’s sole release, the self-titled Pop Art Toasters, proffer five fluffy covers of obscure and semi-obscure vintage pop gems.

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The Jessels - Bobzilla b-w The Worst Noël (1982)

This joint is Chris Knox joined by his partner Barbara, David and Hamish Kilgour, Doug Hood and others around the flat. The a-sider is a fantasy about Doug's cat Bob becoming ten stories high and destroying Christchurch, and the b-side is a bunch of xmas-themed nonsense. Extremely rare, this goes for heaps on eBay and TradeMe.

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David Kilgour ‎– David (Alley Oop Demos) (1989)

All this stuff was recorded for songwriting purposes. To see if ideas were any good or worth pursuing. Mostly recorded immediately after the idea was hit upon or written as tape machine rolled. All in chronological order. Not intended for press reviews, radio play, etc. I guess a carry on from The Clean Oddities.

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David Kilgour - Falling Debris with Sam Hunt (2008)

Kilgour and Hunt together will inevitably throw up real gems and they are scattered throughout the song/poems (which are book-ended by a little sonic scene setting): the strum and easy melody of Every Time It Rains Like This which uses the title as the pivot; Talking of the Winter which could have slid easily into an earlier Kilgour album; and the Dylan-style settings of They Are Clouds and the acoustic A Summertime Blues for Tom.

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David Kilgour - The Far Now (2007)

The album's instrumental textures and lyrical concerns (see, especially, "Wave of Love") are miles away from most contemporary music, let alone "cool" contemporary music. But more often than not, Kilgour crafts these anachronisms into artifacts of wistful nostalgia. With so many indie bands shooting for far-reaching and "ambitious" sounds, it's easy for something as unassuming as The Far Now to fall through the cracks. This is not revelatory music, nor does it seek to be. Instead, The Far Now evokes a kind of humble ease seldom heard these days, and rarely executed this well.

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David Kilgour - Frozen Orange (2004)

Anyone who may have followed the Clean back in the day and lost track of Kilgour should find this a perfect way to rediscover one of the (for the most part) hidden major talents of the indie rock past and present. Everyone else just needs to check this record and this guy out. Hence, Old Reliable. I feel a little odd implying that Kilgour is old, as he hasn't reached the point of complacency or irrelevance that the word implies, but he's been with us for quite some time, and his mark looms so large on the New Zealand music scene that it's difficult not to think of him as an elder statesman. That said, he's fully earned the tag on Frozen Orange, and anyone looking for unpretentious, laidback and solid full-length is hereby invited to check out what's made Kilgour one our most consistent performers for 25 years.

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David Kilgour ‎– A Feather In The Engine (2001)

A Feather in the Engine flows with such grace from one lovely melody to the next that it sounds effortless. Don't believe it--David Kilgour has been working up to this record for over 20 years. The singer, guitarist, and multi-instrumentalist from Dunedin, New Zealand, is a member of the Clean, a trio specializing in making music by not thinking about it; each Clean song is a spontaneous combustion, every album a happy accident. Kilgour's solo discs, on the other hand, have been carefully crafted pieces of jangly guitar pop. This time, instead of going to the studio, he put one into his home so he could record when inspiration struck and then take as long as he wanted to polish his rough gems until they shone. The result is 13 tunes that combine the best of both approaches; they sound fresh and full of discovery, yet reward repeated listens with the depth of their painstakingly multilayered arrangements.

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David Kilgour - First Steps & False Alarms (1995)

A clean-the-vaults release that's a sometimes-murky treat, First Steps & False Alarms cherry-picks from five years' worth of recordings in Kilgour's home tape archive for an overview of his creative starting points from the late '80s and early '90s. Compared to the (appropriately enough) cleaner sound of his earlier solo albums, rougher effects and truly lo-fi, stripped-down arrangements make for quite a change, and in some cases it's actually a bit frustrating. But as a series of snapshots of songs in development -- some are literally fragments or simply random explorations -- it's still quite enjoyable, though definitely an album for the hardcore fan rather than the newcomer. At points the crisp, lovely approach familiar from such albums as Sugar Mouth steps forward. "Tape Machine" is a great example, combining acoustic and electric guitar in a most captivating way. The early take on "Here Come the Cars," meanwhile, is a jaw-dropper, the heavy reverb on both the acoustic guitar and Kilgour's in-the-background vocal calling up whole other worlds in a mere minute and 20 seconds. Other songs, like "Another Echo Downer" and "Landed," aren't quite as stunning, but just as charming and enjoyable. More than once Kilgour comes up with some shatteringly lovely moments that aren't quite replicated on his formal releases. "Scene Two (4 Brian)," with its minimal but full wash of fuzzy keyboards and sighing, wordless vocals, is a brief but astoundingly evocative treat, while the organ beeps into piano and singing then guitar grooves and more on "Untitled" put in a surprising complexity for a home-recorded demo. Lengthy and seemingly patched together from a variety of sources, it still holds together quite well, an exploration in styles and approaches still coming from one central source.

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David Kilgour - Sugar Mouth (1994)

1 review David Kilgour's second solo album, Sugar Mouth, is one of the sweetest slices of timeless guitar pop you can taste. Released on Flying Nun in 1994, the album is now re-issued again on gatefold 12" LP plus an expanded version featuring 10 bonus tracks and demos from the original recording on the CD and download versions. As far as back story goes, well, you could say David Kilgour is something of a cult figure, as the guitar and voice of left-field trio The Clean and a slew of fantastic solo albums hes up to 9 now he has written the blueprint for New Zealand indie music and many bands to come. Indeed, Kilgours talent for writing furiously catchy pop music with an understated Kiwi-style aura of ‚60s psychedlia is well-documented. A musician with a timeless way with guitar and song, just like his terrific debut, Here Come The Cars (1991), Sugar Mouth is also laden with mesmerizing melodies and shimmering pop brilliance.  However, like all his work there is the dash of sunny melancholy, at times swapping out the guitar fuzz for a touch of acoustic strongs and piano. And, like all his work, its ear-catching from the start with No No No, Fallaway and Filter perfect examples of Kilgours knack for well-crafted but deceptively simple songs. Before the album rollicks on through to the quietly graceful closer - Never End. David Kilgour's Sugar Mouth is a stunning record, both glistening and honest, and is yet another reason he can make claim to being one of New Zealands best musical treasures.

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David Kilgour - Here Come The Cars (1991)

4 reviews This is the 1991 album that belatedly launched David's solo recording career. Songs that followed his 1989 purchase of his own Revox tape machine, some performed with Stephen, and others worked up for these Nick Roughan-produced sessions. The 2004 re-mastered version features three extra out-takes and demos not on the original. Mostly setting aside the jet-plane's guitar sound so associated with The Clean, this album ups the strum/jangle quotient (compared to The Clean'sVehicle album of the previous year) to produce a shimmering confection of pure pop.

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Stephen ‎- Radar Of Small Dogs (1993)

Stephen was essentially David Kilgour's project during the last years of the Clean's career, and as a less ambitious "side project," the band felt free to play loosely with the typical pop jangle of New Zealand rock. The result is a body of work that practically defines the simple and gorgeous blend of jangling guitars and beautiful melodies that became a Flying Nun trademark. The label's re-issue of Radar of Small Dogs includes the EP of that name, as well as the Dumb EP and a few live tracks. Dumb, the earliest of the recordings, sticks with the stripped-down jangle that typifies the band; Radar of Small Dogs is slightly more polished and pop-oriented, varying the group's sound and occasionally growing denser than the earlier recordings ("Mary Had a Steamboat"). The collection stands as a lovely example of New Zealand pop, and will doubtlessly be appealing not only to followers of the scene, but the uninitiated as well.

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The Great Unwashed - Collection (1992)

In the wake of the 1982 breakup of the legendary Clean, brothers David and Hamish Kilgour continued writing songs together; adopting the tongue-in-cheek name Great Unwashed, they released the 1983 LP Clean Out of Our Minds, a collection of primitive home recordings with a slightly experimental bent. The record was well received by steadfast Clean fans, and with bassist Peter Gutteridge in tow, the Kilgour brothers played a handful of live dates. A five-track double single subsequently appeared, and in mid-1984 the Great Unwashed swelled to a quartet with the addition of Ross Humphries; however, by the end of the year, the group disbanded.

One-stop shopping, New Zealand style. Collection puts together the Great Unwashed's one album, Clean out of Our Minds, with the following Singles EP, a handy and merry collection of what might have been a diversion at the start but still has its own worth. Richard Langston's liner notes give a brief potted history of the group's origins following the first collapse of the Clean, as David and Hamish Kilgour got together for a slew of random recording sessions that became the album and what followed. The Clean out of Our Minds tracks are in ways bedroom recordings, but unlike what the stereotype of that term became in the '90s, the feeling here is affable and gently goofy melancholia rather than acid-fried weirdness. The easy-blue groove of "Thru the Trees" mixes well with the instrumental shamble of "Hello Is Ray There?" and the at once creepy and merry celebration of wasting time, "It's a Day." Besides, any song which has what sounds like autoharp -- take "Yesterday Was" as an example -- has to have something going for it. The Singles tracks featured the more immediate and live-performance-oriented version of the band, though there's still the easy-enough feel of the album about it, even with the steady chug of songs like "Duane Eddy" and the scrabbling "Can't Find Water." "Born in the Wrong Time," with a particularly lovely lead guitar melody and some of the Kilgours' best harmonies, is the real winner from that bunch, and makes a fine almost-concluding song for the whole disc.

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The Clean/The Great Unwashed ‎- Odditties 2 (1988)

"Odditties 2" was a cassette-only compilation of unreleased recordings, mostly live, by both The Clean and The Great Unwashed. The respective track artists were not printed on the insert; the entire release was simply credited to "The Clean/Great Unwashed." The current data was deduced based on the performance dates below; The Clean disbanded by 1983, around the same time The Great Unwashed formed.

There is only one known issue of this release; track 8, "Small Girl," was apparently omitted on the cassette's insert due to a misprint. The insert has distinct "marker pen graphics" illustrated by Hamish Kilgour (credited as "HRK"). Recorded between 1979 and 1984.

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