If only for the body of work that Steve Kilbey is responsible for with The Church, there should be a statue of him in every major Australian city, make that every city in the world.
“The Road To Tibooburra” sees him in solo mode but reunites him with several players featured on some of his previous solo albums and it takes the form of a concept album or at least a collection of songs with a throughline and connected narrative.
The album has its roots in a silent movie that Kilbey was asked to star in. The movie then morphed into a musical, for which he wrote the music—this music—about a washed-up and aging rockstar called Lord Jim who takes a strange crew off to Tibooburra to search for his comeback.
Like all musical scores, the music has to ebb and flow with the unfolding events of the story. So we are presented with a wide range of music—from the slightly psychedelic folk of the opener, “Adrift,” to the arabesque riffs of out-and-out rocker “Silver City Highway,” and from the 70s Iggy Pop-infused groover “Too Late To Die” to the electric-era Dylan-esque beauty of “Morning After. ” It runs brilliantly around the musical landscape.
The tunes are in no particular order, and not everything found here directly relates to that project, so this is more a soundtrack to a story that you can make up for yourself, one yet to be written, like a choose-your-own-adventure book only comprised of music. This brings up an interesting thought. Imagine if the norm was to write the soundtrack to a film first, and the director and scriptwriters used that to work out what the film was actually about. Imagine the sort of films we would have available to use then. Wild!
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