SPRING BOARD – THE EARLY UNRECORDED SONGS
by The Chills
When musicians die there’s often the temptation to scour a posthumous release for some premonition in lyrics to suggest a knowingness about the inevitable.
Martin Phillipps – who steered his vision of The Chills from the early 1980s until his death last July at 61 – lived with mortality from an early age. His friend and Chills’ drummer Martyn Bull died in 1983 and Phillipps himself faced it in the late 1990s after addictions, hepatitis-C and mental health issues.
But in the last decade, The Chills – a stable line-up with excellent albums Silver Bullets (2015) and Scatterbrain (2021) – were riding high, and Phillipps’ songwriting was acclaimed as a late-career peak others could only wish for.
If there are any intimations of finality in Spring Board – a collection of previously unrecorded songs repolished by Phillipps, The Chills and others – it is swept aside by the sheer joy and energy across the 20 songs.
It’s a measure of Phillipps’ gifts he could resurrect such material and, with tweaking, breathe new life into it.
“All of the songs needed varying degrees of rewriting,” he said. “A 60-year-old man couldn’t just stick to the lyrics of those formative years. And some of the songs were just vague recollections, incomplete, only blossoming during recording.”
And they are elevated by subsequent contributions from Julia Deans, Elroy and Neil Finn, Hollie Fullbrook (Tiny Ruins), Troy Kingi, Shona Laing, Tami Neilson, Dianne Swann, Clementine Valentine and producer Tom Healy.
Juicy Creaming Soda is gloriously shimmering and archetypal Chills jangle-pop (“I don’t regret a thing … the choice was mine”); And When You’re There is a blazing comet of gritty psychedelic rock; the thrusting Declaration has a bitter edge (“clear the air, set things straight … I won’t fight for you now”).
Although born of a much younger man, Phillipps delivers these songs with spirited, animated energy as if rediscovering his former self. The carpe diem message of the jaunty I Don’t Want to Live Forever belies its title.
Certainly, there was often a sublimated melancholy in Phillipps’ lyrics (here on the muscular Dolphins) although If This World Was Made For Me (“I know I just don’t belong”) delivers a self-aware joke: “There’d be 24 hours of great TV”.
The slight I’ll Protect You is sentimental but floats atop billows of guitar and organ, the moody Lion Tamer stumbles on an awkward metaphor (”I think I’ll call my lion ‘fame’ “) and – given current tastes – indie guitar pop of this kind rarely troubles the charts these days, not even The Chills embellished by female vocalists.
Despite the punchy production and familiar Chills motifs, there isn’t a breakout pop hit here, heavenly or otherwise.
But it’s hard to deny the emotional urgency (Stay Longer, The Other), adolescent energy (Steel Skies) and the 1980 electropop soundscapes of Slime and Meet My Eyes (”you’ll see no lies”).
Or that Martin Phillipps – even when rejigging juvenilia – was among our most accomplished and unique songwriters.
Spring Board is available digitally, on double CD and double vinyl. A New Zealand edition of the vinyl includes a Martin Phillipps Scrapbook.
