Ass soon as the anthemic jangles begin in the opening rack ‘Adrift’, you know you are back in the heavenly spheres of Kilbey land: where endless melodies flourish like the greenery after a downpour in the outback desert, and epic instrumentation arcs across the night skies like meteorites.
Steve Kilbey & The Winged Heels is yet another superhighway for Kilbey’s inimitable and prolific songwriting skills (that include The Church, solo work and collaborations with Gareth Koch, Martin Kennedy and Glenn Bennie). The Winged Heels is a who’s who of Australian musical legends – the classicist composer and multi instrumentalist Koch (on bass, backing vocals and other instruments), Roger Mason (Models and Icehouse) on keyboards and cello and Barton Price (Models, Wa Wa Nee and Choirboys) on drums and percussion.
‘The Road To Tibooburra’ was recorded mostly back on 2021 but has probably had to join the extremely crowded and congested highway of releases that epitomise Kilbey’s prolific creative endeavours. Surely a phenomenon worthy of scientific research. Koch says of the album:
The themes of the songs are far-reaching, bound loosely by the thread of outback Australia. The songs are almost roving ballads, originally intended as a musical, composed during Steve’s ‘magical mystery’ bus tour through rural Australia.
As always, there is a vivid story behind this collection. Kilbey says:
During the early days of Covid 19, I met a guy called Julian who asked me to be in a short silent film he was making called ‘Space Junk’. ‘Space Junk’ was about a stranger (moi) who comes to a remote-ish Australian town during the pandemic and has a number of adventures including aliens and angry villagers and other various kinds of weirdness.
The film got kinda finished and had a couple of screenings in a room but then seemed to be abandoned and never properly completed. Julian then repurposed it for a musical about a washed-up and ageing rockstar called Lord Jim (moi again) who takes a strange crew off to Tibooburra searching for his comeback.
Julian asked me to write all of the songs for the musical, which I did and enjoyed doing too. I recorded them all with a wonderful band of players who also appear on my albums 11 Women and The Hall of Counterfeits, whom I dubbed the Winged Heels.
Well then after sitting in the can for ages I have decided to release this weird collection of tunes. They are in no particular order so you’ll just have to figure it all out for yourself. Or just make up your own plot and story and sit back and enjoy. I have also thrown into the mix some contemporaneous songs I was working on with the Heels at the time but I now look upon them as perhaps part of the musical and let you try to make some sense of all this.
Kilbey’s world is a quasi- autobiographical life seen through a distorted creative lens (see for examples the futuristic retro story of The Hypnogogue’). It’s a concept album that reflects the outback, the lonely life of a musician and the long distances travelled across bleak featureless landscapes in the name of art and expression.
The pace over the album is steadfast and shimmering, underpinned by acoustic 12 string sonic waterfalls – weeping pedal guitars in ‘The Morning After’ lend an alt country blush that continues through ‘La Nina’ with a spanish guitar dappling in the ether and an enigmatic instrumentation redolent of a Mark Knopfler instrumental from ‘Local Hero’. Kilbey’s enigmatic lyrics are ever present: telling tall evocative tales that resonate with creativity. A spanish flavour continues in ‘Desert Ship’ where Koch’s classical guitar proficiency surely flavours the rich luscious sounds.
‘Stevie’s Song’ is an epic classic Kilbey track, seemingly a track with an element of autobiographical content: yearning and expressive. ‘Silver City Highways’ is another track that shows Koch’s musical contribution: a dramatic flourish in a driving road trip across the vast expanses and empty highways. The weeping cellos in ‘Lisa’s Song’ with Kilbey’s low sonorous vocals creates something atmospheric and statuesque.
‘Too Late To Die Young’ is a wry clatter of a track, boisterous with a barroom tremble as Kilbey sings rock’n’roll is stupid but it’s fun. This air continues in final track ‘Last Drinks’: a fitting exit to this exquisite journey across the vast sonic landscapes created by Kibey and his Winged Heels: an epic anthemic track with a rowdy, chaotic chorus that one could be imagined to be heard sung by a rowdy crowd at closing time in any tiled pub across the continent.
This is an epic album filled with evocative imagery that envelops a sense of long distance travel over immeasurable distances under a brilliant cloudless antipodean canopy. It’s a broad painted sonic canvas borne on a soundtrack that is as shimmering and expansive as the skies above the outback.
You can download and stream the album here, and Vinyl and CDs are on the way.
