It's surprising that
Hamish Kilgour didn't release a solo album until 2014.
Kilgour was one of the founding members of the massively influential New Zealand indie band
the Clean all the way back in 1978, and over the next several decades played in seminal bands such as
the Great Unwashed,
Bailter Space, and
the Mad Scene, as well as contributing to various smaller projects before and after relocating to New York in the early '90s. As surprising as it is that
Hamish didn't offer up songs under his own name until years into his career as an independent musician, it's even more surprising to hear those songs in the form of
All of It and Nothing, an album of dark, drifting tunes more in line with downer folk than the optimistic jangle of
Kilgour's previous projects. Put to tape by
Ladybug Transistor's
Gary Olson at his Marlborough Farms studio, the album features
Olson and a few other indie session vets (Miggy Littleton,
Danny Tunick) backing up
Kilgour on 11 droning and subdued tunes. Songs like "Crazy Radiance" and the lengthy "Hullabaloo" find
Kilgour's vocals muttering softly over shaky, repetitive acoustic guitars, sounding like Jandek running through some
Velvet Underground covers. These tunes also bear some resemblance to lesser-known New Zealand act
the Garbage & the Flowers, albeit far less noisy and retaining some of
Kilgour's inherent knack for melancholic hooks. Elsewhere on the record, songs like "Strength of an Eye" and "Here It Comes" hold a dark, haunting neo-folk vibe, with glistening bells and spooky echoes rolling over the murky compositions. The overall feeling of the album is dense, but not impenetrable. Understatement gets top billing throughout
All of It and Nothing, from the barely audible shifts in hand percussion to
Kilgour's always buried vocals, but the album works fantastically as a whole. Rather than offering a few hyper catchy pop nuggets, the songs blur nicely into one strange, cloudy mood that refuses to break. ~ Fred Thomas