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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David Kilgour, Sam Hunt & The Heavy Eights - The 9th (2015)

This LP was a long time in the making, in part because all the parties were busy and were determined to record Sam Hunt live with the musicians. So March 2014 Sam came to Dunedin for seven days where we wrote and recorded for about 4 days in an old hotel in Port Chalmers called Chicks. Apart from the three poems mentioned earlier all the rest were worked up over these four days. Sometimes Sam would suggest a mood for a poem, or I might be strumming away idly on guitar playing nothing in particular for no one in particular when Sam would say "hey keep playing that, I think I've got words for that". Or we would pick up our instruments and improvise something up on the spot in pursuit of a Sam suggestion. All of Sam's vocals were cut live with the band." - David Kilgour

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David Kilgour & The Heavy Eights - David Kilgour & The Heavy Eights (1997)

It wasn't really a new band Kilgour was working with, given that longtime bass player/engineer Noel Ward again handled those duties with aplomb. But with Robert Key on drums and a variety of guests stepping in here and there -- including the peerless Barbara Manning with a vocal turn on the trance-y, motorik-touched jam "Locked in Blue" -- Kilgour once again demonstrated why in his entrancing, wonderful way he's such an enjoyable listen. As a whole the album blends the more open warmth in arrangements and feel from Here Come the Cars with the cleaner, crisper edge of Sugar Mouth, though with a definite bias toward the earlier album. The hints of drone and Velvets/Krautrock pace already alluded to crop up again, and very wonderfully at that, from the gentler flow of "Seemingly Stranded" and the softly swooning, trippy "My One" to the more cutting, edgy guitar bite of "Waveboarder" and "Maybe." Kilgour's singing is much more straightforward in comparison to Here Come the Cars, while there's a rougher, darker edge in a number of the songs that adds further variety and depth. "Chop Me in 1/2," with Kilgour's guitar taking the lead in intense but not overwhelming instrumental breaks, is a good example, especially how they set the contrast to calmer but no-less-compelling sections, his wordless crooning leading the way. The psychedelic swirl and groove of "Round the Bend" and the mostly acoustic "Hey You" are two of many other instantly apparent reasons why Kilgour's winning streak looks to be in no sign of dying out.

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David Kilgour And The Heavy Eights - End Times Undone (2014)

Now nine albums deep into his solo career, David Kilgour still keeps one foot in The Clean, yet that trio is sporadic and seemingly unpredictable in terms of output and activity - to the extent that his body of work with band The Heavy Eights is his primary focus and creative outlet. End Times Undone beautifully captures the same mystical lazy strum and innate homespun catchiness of Kilgour’s singing that has characterised all of his work to date. The ingredients of Kilgour’s style were formed early; that Byrdsian jangle, Velvet Underground drone, Dylan-like lyrical dance and wrestle and the motorik pulse of krautrock. All are present in varying degrees here and the combination is both hypnotic gently energising.

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David Kilgour And The Heavy Eights - Left By Soft (2011)

Even on laid-back songs such as the mid-tempo piano ballad "Autumn Sun", there's plenty of fuzzy distortion bleeding through. Kilgour is rather unheralded as a guitarist, but in his early days with the Clean in the 1980s, he helped write the book on a ragged approach to playing that can be heard all over indie rock today. On Left By Soft, he seems to be reminding us that he helped stake out this territory. He opens and closes the album with two distinctly different demonstrations of that talent, leading off with strident noisemaking on the title track and ending things with "Purple Balloon", where he glides over a breezy beat with a series of offhandedly pretty, clear-toned explorations.

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