It’s taken 19 years for Martin Phillipps to get round to releasing the fifth Chills album (and the previous four took 16 years to make), but his manifold troubles in the years since Sunburnt haven’t diminished his melodic gift. The Chills always sounded very particular – spindly guitar lines atop organ-drenched backing, the whole thing slathered in reverb, with Phillipps spilling out words on top – and Silver Bullets fits snugly into their sparse back catalogue. There are links to the past – Phillipps is still worrying about the environment and geopolitics on Underwater Wasteland and America Says Hello – but there’s also an ambitious expansiveness on the eight minutes of Pyramid/When the Poor Can Reach the Moon, which resolves itself into one of Phillipps’s typical bouncing melodies, vocal harmonies tumbling over each other. The Chills’ appeal always lay in their ability to combine brightness and murkiness – they sound almost like the musical embodiment of autumn, part windswept and part golden – and that’s very much present on Silver Bullets, a minor triumph of an album.
