Unearthed

It’s not as though The Church didn’t grant Steve Kilbey enough creative opportunities – their run of albums across the eighties are breathlessly brilliant, and rich with psychedelic pop gems – but there is certainly something curious about hearing Kilbey on his lonesome, giving fullest expression to indulgent whims. One thing that Unearthed exposes, surprisingly perhaps, is just how indebted Kilbey’s vision is to his precursors and peers, the surrealist visions here like a home-recorded Bowie, the subtly displaced mood recalling David Sylvian’s early solo material. (Indeed, much like Sylvian’s Gone To Earth – released the same year, and consisting of an album each of songs and instrumentals – Unearthed is shadowed by its instrumental other, Earthed.) Some might find the clank of a drum machine, the simple huff of keyboards too pared back after the lushness of albums like The Church’s Persia. But if anything, on songs like “Guilty”, the simplicity-in-complexity of Kilbey’s pop vision is clearer than ever before.