It’s been said before, but if anyone wanted a perfect example of a label signing a band it simply didn’t get, you needn’t look much further The Chills’ brief affair with Warner Brothers in the early 90s.
Led by the mercurial but complicated Martin Phillips, they suffered with a Fall-like rotation in personnel after being founded in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1980, following which they became recognised as being at the forefront of a phenomenon known as the Dunedin Sound, along with other outfits such as The Bats, Straitjacket Fits and The Verlaines.
Maybe it was the first rise of the environmentalists which persuaded the suits (Australia’s Midnight Oil had recently had a global hit with the apocalyptic Beds Are Burning), but more likely they were wowed by Heavenly Pop Hit, the whimsical Hammond-driven track which would help take the band’s second album Submarine Bells to number one in their own country. Flecked with gorgeous eddies and subtle twists – the gently shimmering guitar solo of Part Past, Part Fiction, the titular closer’s marching lullaby – it felt both organic and genuine, distinctly vulnerable and light years away from what was happening in the northern hemisphere.
In a move redolent however of the band’s chaotic 20th century modus operandi, Phillips and co parted company before he set to work on its follow-up, Soft Bomb, released two years later. Utilising the more upscale resources available, he brought in polyglot composer Van Dyke Parks, created a fifty-minute-plus song cycle and wrote largely about relationships which were tainted by imbalance.
Instead of heaven, or indeed pop, or even hits, listeners were now confronted by ditties like the Male Monster From The Id, on which the singer stumbles apologetically over, ‘I hit you/I’m sorry/I promise I’ll never do it again’. The sunshine and waves had gone.
With the music world around him now experiencing a tsunami of grunge, indolence and power over melody, Soft Bomb was Phillips returning back to his Dunedin roots, to the starchy post punk which had grown up almost in a Kiwi petri dish, such was their isolation from the raincoated gloom of early 80’s northern England.
At times though he can’t help himself, as Ocean Ocean’s rangy slide guitar and Song For Randy Newman’s rolling piano soften the blunter edges, but the gritty undertow of Strange Case and Background Affair’s pall of impending gloom are visions of an uncertain future for the planet.
Are Submarine Bells and Soft Bomb just two sides of the same coin? For Martin Phillips probably yes; his vexations didn’t really change between them, despite the perverse hire and fire nature which hobbled both The Chills’ tilt at success and by extension his own wellbeing in the years that followed.
Now re-released on vinyl long after their original deletion, in truth only the former remains absolutely essential, but essential it absolutely is, whilst Soft Bomb, like Phillips, remains for those as interested in the writer themselves as their work.
