The Chills took seven years to make their first full album, 1987’s *Brave Words—*seven years of false starts, constantly shifting lineups, and one tragedy that nearly destroyed the band and ended up cementing its virtues. Singer/guitarist Martin Phillipps’ group was at the forefront of the extraordinary little guitar-pop scene in New Zealand in the early ’80s—connected to bands like the Clean, the Verlaines, Tall Dwarfs, and Look Blue Go Purple—and Kaleidoscope World is the major document of their early era. It’s a Katamari of an album, picking up another few songs every time a new edition comes out; since its initial appearance in 1986, it’s progressively bulked up from eight songs to this version’s 24.
The early Chills were inspired by the garage rock of the mid-’60s—their trebly organ sound was usually right out front—and by Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. But they were gentler and sadder and persistently obsessed with mortality. Phillipps was a prolific songwriter early on, so the band had a substantial repertoire by the time they released their first records in 1982: a shared EP with three other bands from Dunedin, followed by the tormented but chipper single “Rolling Moon.” (“Please oh God don’t take us home,” the chorus went.)
A couple of weeks after “Rolling Moon,” they recorded a basic track for the haunted, keening “Pink Frost,” as part of a proposed EP of songs with colors in their titles. Phillipps was dissatisfied with the results, but before they could re-record it, the Chills’ new drummer Martyn Bull fell ill, and the band went on hiatus. Bull died of leukemia a year later; subsequently, Phillipps completed that original recording, exquisitely, and assembled a new version of the Chills. “Pink Frost” became their best-known song, inspiring the names of a band and a Fugazi song. And, although Bull had really only played with the band for a couple of months, his death became the specter haunting the rest of their existence, and the muted, cavernous tone of “Pink Frost” carried over to their next few records.
“Pink Frost” actually made the Top 20 in New Zealand—not bad for an indie band—and so did its follow-up, “Doledrums,” a cheerful readymade about life on unemployment. That’s where the first iteration of Kaleidoscope World ended, as a brief set of eight songs by a curious little band with an impressive live reputation. Over the next few years, other material from the same era started getting tacked on to it: some live tracks, The “Lost” EP (six featherweight songs from the “Doledrums” period), and “I Love My Leather Jacket,” a 1986 glam-stomp single about Phillipps’ keepsake from Martyn Bull. The new additions to the album’s 2016 incarnation are a brief piano instrumental called “Martyn’s Doctor Told Me,” the frazzled rocker “Smile from a Dead Dead Face,” and early takes of a pair of songs the Chills re-recorded later on, including another premonition of doom, “Dan Destiny and the Silver Dawn.” (All four are flown in from 2001’s Secret Box, a three-disc collection of live stuff and oddities.)
Phillipps had evidently been saving his more “writerly” songs for an album—Brave Words and 1990’s lush major-label follow-up Submarine Bells foreground his voice and lyrics much more than these songs do. In fact, the remarkable thing about Kaleidoscope World, given the band’s subsequent reputation as a singer-songwriter vehicle, is how much more of its focus is on the Chills’ sound than on Phillipps’ songwriting. “Purple Girl” is a near-instrumental in the mode of some of the Clean’s minor-key jams; “Bite” is a ridiculous jeremiad directed at an overeater (“You gotta bite that food! You gotta get it inside you!”). “Hidden Bay” is a tiny sliver of a song (written and sung by bassist Martin Kean, who passed through the Chills on his way to Stereolab) that mostly just flexes the band’s live muscle.
That kind of silliness and spontaneity would mostly be absent from the Chills’ later recordings; Phillipps’ growing earnestness served the band magnificently for a few years, but then over-ripened. As he was ravaged by drugs and illness, his output slowed to a drip. The Chills have, surprisingly, had a stable lineup since 2009, but last year’s Silver Bullets was one of only two full-length albums of new songs that they’ve managed to complete in the past two decades. They weren’t able to live up to the promise of Kaleidoscope World in the long term, but its playful melancholy and somber chime still glisten like sunlight on weathered ice.
