The Chills — Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs (Fire)
Photo by Jon Thom Moodie Tuesday
Martin Phillips got an unexpected second wind in the mid-2010s, after a second round of experimental treatment for hepatitis C proved successful. For the first time in a decade, the Chills singer and songwriter was able to write and perform and even tour, and he attacked this bonus round of creative life with fervor. The Chills released three albums of new material in quick succession, and with a band this good, Phillips began to think about the reams of older material he’d accumulated over the years.
In an interview with Aquarium Drunkard in 2021, Phillips said, “Traditionally, especially with the old Chills albums, Soft Bomb and Submarine Bells, there were just reams of material. I just wrote a lot of stuff.” He added, “One of the things we may do with this downtime is finally record all our early Chills album, even a song at a time. Everyone’s really keen on that. We’ve done a couple of them here and there. There are certain years when we never released a proper album. It would be personally satisfying, and I think a lot of fans have heard the bootleg versions.”
Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs is both the early stages of that reclamation project and an elegiac farewell. It revisits 20 songs that Phillips wrote in the 1980s, before the world heard “Rolling Moons” or “Pink Frost” or “I Love My Leather Jacket,” or really any of the Chills’ haunting, effervescent but wistful pop gems. That it comes a year after the songwriter died adds special poignancy to the music.
In a career where there was never enough time, these songs play in a very thought-provoking way with the concept of linear narrative. Here’s Phillips writing about the crushing weight of fame in “Lion Tamer” half a decade before anyone knew who he was, then rewriting the song on the other end of a lifetime, after several vertiginous peaks and sickening plummets on the rollercoaster. And there he is considering the lost years of drug addiction in “Such Self Pity” before he experienced them and also, after he’d left them behind. The needle in his arm is a foretaste of what would upend his career and a memory at the same time. “I Don’t Want to Live Forever,” he sings, against a cheerful bubble of keyboards and a sprightly drum machine beat, insouciant and melodic in an all-hands unison chorus, unaware that he was “going to die…alive” sooner than anyone expected.
And yet, when you get beyond the temporal slipperiness, you’re left with a collection of excellent pop songs, well-crafted in both tune and lyrics, and adeptly played by a sharp and able band. The melodramatic arc of his life aside, Phillips was just really good at his art, delivering ebullient songs with a shiver at their core. “Jelly Head” rides a giddy organ riff through effervescent melody, punching the chorus with force but without heaviness. The song—and the band that plays it—is tight as hell but also threaded with deep questions about who we are and what we’re doing here. “If This World Was Made for Me” drifts in like the fog, jangly but melancholy like the indelible “Pink Frost,” but stabbed through with surf guitars, sparkly bits of keyboard magic and insistent drums.
Phillips was up front about how much work he had to do on these songs to get them to this form. He had flesh them out, to make them relevant to his 60-something self and to arrange them for his current band. And so, while there is likely still a pile of unreleased material in his estate, there can never be another reclamation like this one. There’s a kind of wonder in seeing an artist’s earliest ideas re-made at the end of his career, and, beyond that, 20 good songs that we might never have heard. We may not get any more, but we’re lucky to have this one. RIP Martin Phillips.
You know when something has left its mark on the world when you hear it in the music.
#FlappyBird you were one great opponent for the Smart Phone Generation.
Great Tune BTW, not just for the #Sharkiesha and #FlappyBird Ref.
