May 05, 2019
“Sydney Rococo is my Sydney filtered thru lush orchestras and sighing voices. The summers the dreams the vegetation always pushing skywards. The inexorable rush of love and the deep chasm of loneliness. Songs about things that happened and things that never could have happened. Songs for a banker or for a tramp. Songs about the seediness and the sea. Songs of Sydney morning and Sydney night.”
Steve Kilbey, Nov 2018
*****
One of Australia’s greatest and most treasured songwriters, Steve Kilbey has released the second single from his 2018 album Sydney Rococo.
Director Clint Lewis from Red Tape Pictures describes the music video for When I Love Her She Sings as “a psychedelic love letter comprised of animated headshots in a technicolour landscape. Much of the imagery exists as a throwback to early experimental music videos of the 70s. Layers of coloured oils and alcohol move under the heat of a lightbulb to produce a liquid light show comprised of changing colour patterns that wash over Kilbey’s animated performance.”
The vibrant & fun video makes for an interesting departure from the black & white Film Noir style of Kilbey’s previous single ‘Sydney Rococo’ released November 2018.
Revisit that video here
Ted Howard, who mixed and engineered each track on the album Sydney Rococo, remembers each song’s recording session vividly. “Steve was in charge and enjoying himself as the ringmaster, having a lot of fun“. Listening back now to When I Love Her She Sings, Ted’s first impressions are that it sounds as colourful as the album cover looks (artwork by Gail Potocki). WILHSS’s rhythmic groove is a pronounced “strutting sexy Kilbey thing”, that “teases with lines like ‘I want to go up & kiss that caramel skin’, and then Jak Housden playing the incredible guitar melodies in the chorus, are a beautiful counterpoint to Steve’s vocals. Kilbey can be dark and thunderous, but this is the big, joyous, colourful Kilbey.”
Steve Kilbey is currently touring the US with The Church, and will head home briefly later this month before rebounding off to the UK and Europe for a few more shows with The Church. Plans are underway for some solo shows when he returns home to Australian soil, including exploring opportunities to bring the chamber rich lush sound of this solo album to a few very special live Sydney Rococo shows, complete with strings attached.
Download, stream, buy When I Love Her She Sings. Just get it!
You’ll soon yearn for the other facets that together form this brilliant SK jewel.
Sydney Rococo is perhaps Steve Kilbey’s best solo offering so far, after more than 25 solo albums of his own.
Brilliance.
Sydney Rococo, featuring When I Love Her She Sings is available now
smarturl.it/SydneyRococo
*****
Steve Kilbey is Australian contemporary music royalty. A prolific artist who has written, performed and produced 21 solo albums, as well as 30 with rock legends The Church.
His artistic oeuvre spans more than 45 years, and reaches outside the world of music, flowing in a cellular formation through his poetic lyrics into his psychedelic art paintings and far beyond.
Steve has published 3 books (with a new one in the works), composed and written 750 songs, has conjured lyrics of biblical proportions, poured out plenteous poetry and imagined and realized hundreds of original paintings.
Sydney Rococo is a collection of songs Kilbey has written over the last 5 years. The songs sing of Sydney and her ocean pools, her underground seedy hangouts, and treachery. The picture is painted in every song about life in this fast growing and evolving Australian city, famed for her beaches and landmarks.
What’s most tangible in the music is the lifestyle, habits and pastimes of those that belong to a non mainstream world. Each song is a love song, but also a tale of woe and heartache. Typical Kilbey, making us fall in love and simultaneously feel the heartbreak of loss, betrayal and abandonment. Come and feel it within a song or 11 and get your own moves on with the infectious, pumping rhythmic melodies and the layers of lush strings and vocals. Steve worked closely with good friend, George Ellis on this album, who masterfully arranged the strings and brought a unique classical feel to the tapestry.
This is SK’s finest work to date. Fresh and modern, conceived with muses, it’s now out in the world. Don’t let your ears and imagination miss it.
*****
“Something very strange has happened to Steve Kilbey. The voice of the Church has run a parallel solo career throughout his 40-odd-year musical journey, but generally the albums released under his own name were lower-key affairs than his band releases. That’s clearly no longer the case.”
“From the first listen it’s clear that none of the songs on the album could have easily been Church numbers. That’s impressive, since they mainly feature a similar guitars/bass/drum set-up (with a band that includes former Badloves member Jak Housden and Models’ sticksman Barton Price, plus ethereal backing vocals from Robyn Lau) but the layers of piano and strings push them in fascinating new directions. The production, too, is undecidedly un-Churchy, with Kilbey’s voice placed up front and centre.”
“The agenda-setting title track is an affectionate love letter to his home city. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny, thanks to lines such as, “When the pingers wear off, they’ll bring us something to eat”. It’s matched by I Love It When She Sings, the sort of big-chord pop song Kilbey hasn’t written in a long time. At the risk of destroying Kilbey’s reputation for wry, introverted mystery, this is possibly the most outright joyful he has sounded since … actually, perhaps ever.” Andrew P. Street (The Australian)
“…Emerging from the last five years with help from guitarist Jak Housden, drummer Barton Price and pianist Amanda Kramer, Kilbey convinces us one more time with songs like Distant Voices, When I Love Her She Sings and The Wrong One, that he is truly an exceptional storyteller…” Musik Woche (Germany)
*****
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