Hidden Treasure: Submarine Bells
Featured Album
There’s a moment when a piece of summer fruit is perfectly ripe, and as sweet and fragrant as it’s ever going to be, with just the slightest note of what’s going to become decay. There’s an emotional state that’s very much like that, joy that’s more profound because it’s connected to sadness. The Chills ‘songwriter Martin Phillipps was once a great evoker of that sort of emotion, and his band’s 1990 marvel Submarine Bells embodies that particular moment in their own history.
The Chills were one of a cluster of scrappy, wonderful New Zealand rock bands associated with the Flying Nun label, and with one another: Tall Dwarfs, the Verlaines, the Clean, the Bats, Look Blue Go Purple, and many others. They formed in 1979 as a garage-rock band with their hearts on their sleeves, and over the next decade they released a string of singles and EPs (and one gorgeous album, Brave Words), building up a following in the international pop underground. They also had a famously rapid lineup churn – Phillipps was the only permanent member – and Submarine Bells was recorded by the 11th version of the Chills, featuring keyboardist Andrew Todd, bassist Justin Harwood (who would go on to join Luna) and drummer James Stephenson.
In 1990, as an underground rock band moving to a major-ish label, the Chills ‘leap to the Warner subsidiary Slash came with a boatload of expectations. Maybe they’d be a moderately big deal like Split Enz, the biggest New Zealand band before them; maybe they’d really be huge; maybe they’d be a beloved cult item. In any case, it was clear that Phillipps was an enormously ambitious musician with a fully formed aesthetic, and Submarine Bells was arguably the first time he’d had the money to pull off something like what he had in mind.
That turned out to be an album about emotional mystery and the way pop music itself can illuminate it. The lyrics are full of references to sunlight and water (the front cover is an underwater shot of a jellyfish silhouetted by sunlight) – Brian Wilson and his occasional collaborator Van Dyke Parks are recurring reference points, especially on the prayerful title track and its rippling, drifting chamber-music arrangement. A few songs appear to be about Phillipps ‘own grand ambitions, especially “Singing In My Sleep”: “Earth’s emotions encaptured/But the songs fade away when I wake.” (The 40-second “Sweet Times” does suggest a fragment of a song salvaged from a dream.) “Heavenly Pop Hit,” the album’s spectacular opening track, imagines pop music as the sun around which everything orbits, and suggests Phillipps as a sort of Icarus, even as it hints that his kind of pop idolatry was becoming a thing of the past.
Phillipps ‘kind of songcraft flourished in the late ’60s (he’s reputed to be a living encyclopedia of ’60s rock) – its hallmarks are concision, tunefulness, plainspokenness, distinctiveness of voice and attention to instrumental detail. Submarine Bells flows like icy water from melody to melody and arrangement to arrangement. “The Oncoming Day” is headlong, hurtling, totally vulnerable garage-rock; “Effloresce and Deliquesce” (Phillipps always did like $10 words) is hooked by an exquisite, muted guitar-and-keyboard figure; the fluttering melody of “Singing In My Sleep” is made more vivid by a pulsing, neon-bright tremolo guitar sound. And the album is clearly and proudly a product of New Zealand: Phillipps doesn’t even pretend to hide his natural accent.
Submarine Bells was a #1 album in New Zealand; it failed to do anything particular commercially in the U.S., beyond its success at college radio. And then the Chills ‘moment of perfect ripeness began to pass. The band’s lineup kept shifting, and their next album, 1992′s strained but even more ambitious Soft Bomb, paired Phillipps with an entirely different set of Chills, who broke up at the end of the subsequent tour. 1996′s Sunburnt was credited to “Martin Phillipps & the Chills” and recorded with a British pickup group. The ensuing 14 years have seen a set of demos, a three-disc collection of old live tracks and rarities, and most recently an odds-and-ends EP called Stand By, on whose sleeve Phillipps announced that he was “preparing to take the band in quite a new direction with the next album. And on that we will begin shortly.” That was 2004; he always did have a habit of making what business law refers to as “forward-looking statements.”
The Chills still exist in one form or another; they’ve got a track, “Luck or Loveliness,” on the new Chris Knox tribute album, Stroke. They’ve never stopped playing gigs in New Zealand. There might even be another great record in them, in the same way that there might be another great record in Brian Wilson – although chasing after heavenly pop hits and being dissatisfied with earthbound realities has been Phillipps ‘weakness for decades. He’s already flown as close to his personal sun as anyone ever gets to.
