I Get Chills

The Chills wrote "Pink Frost" one of the best songs ever, and "I Love My Leather Jacket" one of the best fashion statements ever, and "Heavenly Pop Hit" which, in a better, fairer world, would actually be one. They are the radiant, pop-jangling magicians of the NZ pop triad (Clean, Bats, Chills), and they have a new live album out called Somewhere Beautiful. It's got all three of those songs I just mentioned and 17 others, a triple LP if you buy the vinyl, and it could not possibly be more fun. If you have all the Chills' proper albums (and I have a bunch of them), it's still worth listening to, even if just to hear them rough things up.

The Chills released a single "Molten Gold" this year, their first new material since 2004.


Here's a kind of minidocumentary about Somewhere Beautiful


Martin Phillips just does a little taste of "Pink Frost" in the above, which hardly seems right. Here's the whole thing. Isn't it wonderful?

Pink Frost

I have been kind of depressed lately…not sleeping well, antsy, worried about money as usual. I’m not working enough and starting to worry that this is not just the recession, but possibly I’ve lost my edge and will never get back to a place where I can support my family comfortably. So, anyway, I’ve been not a lot of fun to be around lately, but made an effort over the weekend. We went to get a Christmas tree, which was oddly stressful and unrewarding, and then to a youth production of “Fiddler on the Roof”, though to get there, we had to drive through a terrible rainstorm, where you could hardly see five feet ahead. Anyway, we tried to do some fun stuff, but none of it was very much fun, if you know what I mean. Oh, yeah, I went out for a run on Sunday and slipped on a skim of ice and fell and hit my back and head…so even that didn’t work out very well. It’s been an odd, kind of punishing few weeks, where pretty much everything turns to shit.

One mildly good thing, though I can’t say it offset the above, we got “Pink Frost” twice on the random play on the way down to Brattleboro, so, with no reviews for the foreseeable future (Dusted’s gone to best of lists which are worth checking, too), here’s a video of that.

Pink Frost…refrosted

Morr Music has put together a two-CD tribute to New Zealand pop called Not Given Lightly…in which Morr-ish artists (Tarwater, Lali Puna, Wooden Birds, B. Fleischman) cover beloved songs by kiwi bands. There are two covers of “Pink Frost” which I’ve been enjoying quite a lot. It seems kind of hard to mess that song up.

Here are the Chills performing the original




Masha Qrella’s version