Steve Kilbey And The Winged Heels ‘The Hall of Counterfeits’ Review: The Church frontman indulges all his various musical obsessions on vast and varied double-album.
In 1990 I released an album called Remindlessness in which I attempted to take in everything I had ever been fascinated by and reconcile the whole damn lot with a weird and wild bunch of songs.
Thirty years on, armed with three brilliant musicians (The Winged Heels), time has enabled me to give voice to those same preoccupations: past lives, Indian and Middle Eastern music, religion, ancient history, the Beatles and the many implications of their work.
That’s a quote from vocalist and bassist Steve Kilbey in a press release for his new double-album The Hall of Counterfeits, and it’s an apt descriptor as any for this sprawling work, which he also described as a huge strange unwieldy chaotic dense bunch of songs.I have never been prouder of an achievement in my life.
That’s a bold statement for an artist as prolific as Kilbey, who in addition to his acclaimed body of work with The Church, has also amassed a vast solo career, along with other musical projects including Jack Frost and Kilbey/Kennedy (who recently released their Jupiter 13 album).
Thankfully for an artist of his caliber, he can easily back up his hyperbole, aided up by an accomplished group of collaborators including drummer Barton Price, and multi-instrumentalists Gareth Koch and Roger Mason.
Arcadia opens the album. and its ambient country soundscapes and dusky drones cast an immediate spell, full of atmospherics and stately grandeur. The calm before the storm if you will.
That’s because it’s followed by first single Swinging On The Moon, a ramshackle concoction that veers from nerve jangling verse to soothing chorus–a part garage rock/part sea shanty opus that fairly encapsulates the album’s wide range of sounds in one package.
Kilbey’s love of Middle Eastern and Indian music is indeed pronounced on the album, from the mystical and psychedelic Karnak to the percussive and keening Horizon Meets the Ground to I Shall Not Want, an ethereal mood piece driven by a mantra (the sky is my mother I shall not want /I’m looking for the things I cannot see/the rain is like a voice when you’re lying awake).
In many respects, The Hall of Counterfeits is an album about destinations, whether it be a musical snapshot (the enchantingly frantic Anglesea), a wish to return to a faraway land (Karnak), or a sense of disorientation with one’s surroundings (The Velvet Underground-ish I’ve Been Here Before). It gives the album a unique sense of wanderlust, a sonic travelogue for the mind.
Lyrically and vocally, Kilbey often plays it faster and looser than his previous output–a case in point being the song Amorous Plethora, where he dryly recounts an intimate encounter with royalty (She cooks in the bedroom and she kills you with her looks/the Queen of Armenia likes my style, she’s gonna pay a pretty penny, the nicest lady I met in awhile) followed by his cackling, as if he improvised the lyrics on the spot and tickled himself with the results.
While the album veers toward the exotic, experimental and eclectic (the backwards guitar effects and watery percussion of Ariadne, the distorted vocals of Bound In Servitude) there are other tracks where Kilbey hits that melodic sweet spot of his work with The Church.
Take Wish, a sunny acoustic dose of power pop, or the genteel folk of Unrule, which sounds like a strange fusion of Jim Croce’s I Got A Name and Radiohead’s High and Dry, or More of Less, a pastoral ballad that has hooks for days.
But the biggest earworm on the album is Tantric Hammer. Its not just the catchiest track on The Hall of Counterfeits; the jangly Beatlesque melody and stream-of-consciousness lyrics make for one of Kilbey’s finest compositions.
At 23 tracks, The Hall of Counterfeits isn’t the standard musical release we’ve become used to in the 21st century. It’s not a sparse collection of songs meant to be digested in one sitting, then promptly forgotten as our brains become distracted by numerous internet diversions and streaming television.
No, it’s an old-school investment, a double album that demands your undivided attention, which takes multiple listens to fully appreciate all the unique quirks and textures.
And for all its off-the-cuff qualities, it is truly meant to be listened to as presented: in sequential order, so that one can appreciate all of its odd and wonderful twists and turns in the way its maker intended.
Or, as Kilbey puts it: The record I had to make before I shuffle off this mortal coil and begin again all over – some other time, some other place. But this record is the big one and even if I do get another thirty years down here it will be a hard one to ever top.
Here’s hoping for another 30 years, because the ever prolific Kilbey continues to drink from a musical fountain of youth that has yet to run dry, as The Hall of Counterfeits perfectly exemplifies.
