“In the event of my disappearance/ Please don’t make me demand my fear,” mumbles Hamish Kilgour on “Hullabaloo”, the longest and weirdest track on All of It and Nothing. It's the official solo debut of the co-founder of the legendary indie-rock band the Clean; the group’s other main member, Hamish’s brother David Kilgour, has long been polishing his popcraft on his own, most recently on End Times Undone. But it’s taken Hamish this long—a third of a century after the Clean’s first records—to get around to making his presence definitively felt as a solo artist. And here he is, singing about his own imminent disappearance. Under his breath, of course.
“Hullabaloo”, at seven and a half minutes, is not only the lengthiest of All Of It and Nothing’s cuts, it encapsulates the album’s extremes. It starts out as a murky psych-folk. Halfway through, it’s clear that it’s become more of a drone. By song’s end, that drone has melted into a cosmic-jazz smear of reverb and drifting note-clusters, with random instruments ebbing and flowing through the vacuum. The phrase “ice cream cake” has never been uttered with more menace. Compared to David’s tight, immaculate, guitar-savvy compositions, Hamish sounds downright dizzy. It doesn’t even resemble Hamish’s own laidback vibe in his long-running project the Mad Scene. But that disorientation is what makes the album so atmospheric. Well, that and tracks like “Rave Up (For the Yellow Dogs)”, a sawing, moaning, chanted mantra aided by slinky marimba that recalls Hamish’s work with Theo Angell four years ago on their all-raga album under the name Cloudcraft.
Hamish dips into his past liberally on All of It and Nothing. The album was recorded by Gary Olson of the Mad Scene (and also of The Ladybug Transistor), although the rambling, off-kilter whimsy of “Going Out” and “Crazy Radiance” hew closer to Daniel Johnston’s cracked-glass vision of folk-pop. (The cover of All of It and Nothing , with its jumble of sketchy juvenilia, could even pass for one of Johnston’s.) Mostly, though, Hamish’s shambolic strumming and clumps of acidic imagery pick up the loose threads of Clean Out of Our Minds, the 1983 bedroom-made album he and David released in 1983 under the handle the Great Unwashed, as if the past 30 years never happened or simply didn’t matter.
Rather than forging something distinct and discreet with his first solo album, Hamish has cast his imagination backward and let it roam. On “Turn Around”, he seems to be making up the lyrics on the spot, freestyling in a mock-Lou Reed deadpan, “Self-nostalgic/ Avoid the tragic.” His voice sinks into the song, utterly committed to noncommittal. Still, it seems like something more ineffable than laziness is compelling him. “This is the last...”, he sings on the album’s final track, “The Last Song”, apparently unable to summon the wherewithal to complete his sentence. Then he continues, “…marks the end of this album/ And the journey isn’t over quite yet/ Mistakes were made.” Instead of self-deprecating, All of It and Nothing is a meditation on invisibility and absence, rendered both playfully and ominously in songs that erase themselves as they go along. Hamish muffles that message a little too often, but it’s all part of the vanishing act.
