![]() Soppy sentimentalists aren’t honest enough to admit “I’d like to say how I love you / But it’s all been said in other songs,” as Phillipps does on the same album’s “Night of Chill Blue.” Gooey bands do not write lines like “Oh god, this white ward stinks, sterilized stench of sticky death, sniveling relatives at the feet of another moist corpse, but that corpse is Jayne and Jayne can’t die” (from Brave Words’ “16 Heart-throbs”). Guitars may twinkle like harps and jangle over angelically whispery vocals, but the love songs are never gooey. At its best, the Chills’ work boasted an undercurrent of dark uneasiness that clearly marked it as a vehicle for personal expression rather than mere genre exercise. Perhaps the most widely known and beloved combo of New Zealand’s ’80s indie-pop boom, Dunedin’s Chills - led by singer-writer-guitarist Martin Phillipps - made clean, understated, catchy music whose consistent taste and subtlety conspired to keep the band from having real commercial success in America. ![]()
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