Whilst sadness surrounds the unveiling of this posthumous affair from The Chills – following the premature passing of the New Zealand group’s only constant member Martin Phillipps last year – we can take comfort in the fact that the late-re-blooming legacy continues to be given considerate curation on Fire Records. A fully fledged and seemingly intentional swansong project, conceived by Phillips himself, Spring Board brings the band’s somewhat unwieldy story full circle to a well-groomed, if pathos-tinged, celebratory conclusion.
With the most stable recent years line-up and handful of guests — including Crowded House’s Neil Finn and Tiny Ruins’ Hollie Fullbrook — in harmonious traction, the collection revisits and reworks twenty primordial but previously uncut pieces from the pre-Brave Words phase of Phillipps’s writing career. The result is a collection of material that refracts formative-era freshness through the elaborations and maturity that gave us the restorative studio trilogy of 2015’s Silver Bullets, 2018’s Snow Bound and 2021’s Scatterbrain.
As a double album, teeming with strings-supplemented and backing vocal-bolstered ensemble arrangements, Spring Board initially feels a tad overwhelming. However, when factoring in an awareness of the grand finality and the four-sided piecemeal portioning of the vinyl version, it makes more sense over successive spins. Consequently, proceedings cross almost the full spectrum of The Chills’ sound, with a few fresh twists and turns interspersed, inside the seventy-odd-minute run time.This takes us through swooping chug-alongs (“Learn To Try Again”, “Declaration” and “Jellyhead”); breathy lush art-rock (“If This World Was Made For Me” and “Bad Eggs”); chiming Dunedin soulfulness (“Juicy Creaming Soda”); sumptuous baroque-pop (“I’ll Protect You” and “Stay Longer”); oblique nods to The Blue Öyster Cult (“Steel Skies”); dreamy languid meanders (“Meet My Eyes”); macabre Swordfishtrombones-esque diversions (“Lion Tamer”); psychedelic rockabilly swerves (“Watching Old Home Movies”); and undeniably poignant ramshackle prettiness (“I Don’t Want To Live Forever”).Whether this is the very final Fire-enabled release from The Chills remains to be seen – particularly when 1996’s Sunburnt LP and a few other catalogue items still have much-needed reissue treatments outstanding. Yet, for now at least, Spring Board serves as a rewarding and fitting official farewell statement.
-Adrian-
