It must feel good to reach the point in a career when you can just head into the studio with a few other guys and casually knock out a satisfying record. Maybe I'm projecting here, though. For all I know, David Kilgour spent grueling hours refining the songs on Left By Soft and rehearsed his band with military discipline, but that doesn't seem likely. The album was recorded in less than a month, close to Kilgour's Dunedin, New Zealand, hometown, with a small band consisting of longtime collaborators Taane Tokona, Thomas Bell, and Tony de Raad. Bell produced the sessions, and like most of Kilgour's solo work, it has a relaxed and quietly accomplished air.
The billing given to the band here, just the second time the Heavy Eights have been listed on a Kilgour album cover, is instructive. These musicians have a good read on Kilgour as a bandleader, and the accompaniment they provide-- and the impression I get from the music-- suggests this was very much a guys-in-a-room recording process. The steady backing lets Kilgour loose to explore with his guitar, and he seizes the opportunity. His lead on "A Break in the Weather" sounds barely controlled, as though he's intentionally flirting with chaos before pulling back.
Even on laid-back songs such as the mid-tempo piano ballad "Autumn Sun", there's plenty of fuzzy distortion bleeding through. Kilgour is rather unheralded as a guitarist, but in his early days with the Clean in the 1980s, he helped write the book on a ragged approach to playing that can be heard all over indie rock today. On Left By Soft, he seems to be reminding us that he helped stake out this territory. He opens and closes the album with two distinctly different demonstrations of that talent, leading off with strident noisemaking on the title track and ending things with "Purple Balloon", where he glides over a breezy beat with a series of offhandedly pretty, clear-toned explorations.
The album as a whole smoothly bridges the ground between these two instrumentals, though it's fair to say that the songwriting on the vocal tracks is overshadowed by the interplay of the band. On "Could Be on My Way", Kilgour's lyrics and vocal melody function more as a hook to hang the instrumental on than as a fully-fledged song. But even when the lyrics are more developed, they don't really seem to be the point. This is Kilgour's guitar album, an open showcase for his approach to the instrument.
