It feels almost mandatory to begin any review of a new Chills record with a reference to their almost-breakthrough song Heavenly Pop Hit, a 1990 masterpiece so contagious is was probably classified by the Centre For Disease Control as an epidemic.
Such was its global impact that it pitched the New Zealanders into a world of unit shifting not of their own making; in many ways the hummably strident tune has been the band’s millstone ever since, even the now reinvigorated and much changed form it now resides in.
Their one constant since then has been writer-in-chief Martin Phillipps, for whom a personal journey through addiction and now sobriety has been most testing. Never overly productive, it’s been three years since the last Chills album Silver Bullets, one on which their frontman continued to rue the implacability of fortune and Corporate America’s malign grip on everything.
Described as an album about ‘consolidation, re-grouping, acceptance and mortality…hopefully a kind of Carole King Tapestry for ageing punks’ by the man himself, it might, given what’s transpired politically in the last three years, have been reasonable to believe that Phillipps would stroll further towards his own heart of darkness, but Snow Bound in fact is literally stuffed full of upbeat melodies and major chord friendliness, even if his gift for allegorical lyrics speaks to his continued grip on social conscience.
Such a cards-on-the-table vista gives these songs a freedom; opener Bad Sugar is delicate but assured, guitars weaving exquisitely through a brightness snatched from the band’s most accessible pasts, while Scarred has a more jagged edge tempered by a clutch of resonant keyboards.
In making himself so accessible, Phillipps risks more, of course, than whetting the appetite for The Chills’ distinctive contradictions, their less precise and bitter undertow, a dichotomy emphasised on the otherwise swaggering reel of Lord Of All I Survey, the singer in lamentation for squander, disguised with a visage of anthemic folk-rock. On the title-track, the steps are even less obvious, words of ‘You once had a reason for your righteous fight/ The world an oyster – yours by birth-right/ But you’re not entitled no more/There’s no more ignoring all the sad things you saw’ biting at the chains of pre-destiny.
With The Chills audience now firmly set – whether either party likes it or not – some of these ruminations in public are risks, naïve maybe, but such is the confidence on display Snow Bound only misses once, with Eazy Peazy, a lightweight victim of slipping too far down the cracks of its own rabbit hole.
From every perspective though, such a brief failure is acceptable, flaws which have ever only come with the territory. Both telling and playing it like it is are sides of the same coin, once struck by The Chills in the last century and a tradition their once maverick frontman has made the focal point of his relationship with us all.
Snow Bound opens a new chapter of this book, a confessional that remains much like an open window into one man’s past, present and future.
