David Kilgour and Sam Hunt - Falling Debris

Rating:

* * *

Having delivered a dream run of solo albums over recent years, David Kilgour - guitarist-singer of The Clean - has taken to the back pages of fellow cultural elder statesman Sam Hunt. It might have Hunt's name on the lid but he's nowhere to be heard.

Kilgour took some poems he thought might work, worked them up, and got Hunt's approval along the way. The result is a quietly hypnotic album that treats Hunt's words as just an outline to be coloured in by Kilgour and backers' dreamy acoustic-framed arrangements.

It can stir up imaginary echoes of Bob Dylan (especially on Summertime Blues for Tom) and Aussie lit-rock greats the Go-Betweens (First One Hit, Talk of the Weather) while the likes of Everytime It Rains Like This is the sort of effortless folk-rock which has made Kilgour an enduring figure among those who came of age in the Flying Nun years.

Though the funny thing perhaps is that Hunt's renditions of poems like the aforementioned First One Hit ("Steam coming out her ears/ she tears at me like the wind tears the trees" ) are, live, far more hard-hitting and rock'n'roll than the airy treatment Kilgour gives the nine poems here. Collectively it makes for a pleasantly tuneful wander through Hunt's evocative verses. But its restraint makes it an album that's only the sum of its parts

Russell Baillie