Album reviews: Robert Scott, David Kilgour

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6 Aug, 2014 05:00 PM2 mins to read

Robert Scott, David Kilgour with the Heavy Eights.

Right now someone is probably pondering the recent vinyl reissues of albums by the Clean and the Bats and muttering something about the good old days. Which of course they were.

But one would hope that rampant Nun-stalgia doesn't get in the way of these two solo-ish albums by the guys who were/are two thirds of the Clean and one quarter of the Bats and are still out there, as they say, doing it.

Bat-man Robert Scott's The Green House follows his terrific last solo outing of 2010 Ends Run Together and the Bats' resurgent Free All Monsters album of 2011.

Like his earlier set, The Green House makes a virtue of switching from quiet acoustic singer-songwriter intimacy to quietly freaked-out folk-rock (as on the dreamy scorch of Vertigo and Month of Sundays).

The songs that stick quickest though are Scott's duets with Hollie Fullbrook (of Tiny Ruins) on the likes of opener Your Lights Are Low, Lazy Boy and, possibly best of all, Now In Your Hands in which Scott and Fullbrook's interlaced voices do something lovely to the short devotional ditty.

It's also a set with a sense of shape, shifting neatly into widescreen mode toward the end on the likes of Hear the Hondas and the closing swirl of Right From Wrong. It adds up to another great Scott album. No attachment to those good old days required.

If Scott's album is a crafted affair, David Kilgour's latest solo outing with regular backers the Heavy Eights feels more like a set of happy guitar-powered accidents, though the results are still a definite improvement on 2011's scrappy Left by Soft.

That said, we're not exactly in unfamiliar territory with the 10 songs set against the usual Kilgour textures - grand guitar jangle topped by his distinctively warped lead lines and nonchalant vocals.

At its best, like on the opening psychedelic surges of Like Rain, the Clean-drone of Lose Myself in Sound or the heavy crankings of Dropper and Down the Tubes, it's still a hypnotically exciting thing. While the likes of Christopher Columbus and Comin' On shows Kilgour hasn't lost his knack for the sort of whimsical pop hooks that creep up on you through the great guitar haze.