David Kilgour & Sam Hunt- Falling Debris
6/10

I remember when I was a teenager and Sam Hunt visited my High School, we all thought it was a bit lame, being a boys school. He was actually quite entertaining, but we were all a bit staunch to admit we were interested in poetry. Years later, when studying poetry at university, I came to read some of Hunt’s work; funnily enough, it was just how I remembered it back in high school. So when I heard he had collaborated with the former frontman of iconic kiwi band The Clean I prepared myself for something avant-garde, slightly dirty and over flowing with expression. But I never got it. Falling Debris features Kilgour and his backing band The Heavy 8s playing music the way they always have, the only difference being that the lyrics are written by Sam Hunt. Since going solo, Kilgour’s music has always been a bit hollow, you can always hear elements of The Clean’s flamboyant experimental rock, but it’s more restrained and often has an ‘easy listening’ quality. Falling Debris is definitely in that same vein. Hunt’s poetry loses its charm and it ends up sounding like it was deliberately written as a musical collaboration rather than a piece of poetry. Kilgour’s original idea, when he first motioned it past Hunt was to do some sort of spoken word record, which perhaps would have done a better job at capturing Hunt’s poetic creativity. A collection of old and new poems were used to form this record. Kilgour initially started using older poems and when Hunt fully committed to the project he started sending Kilgour new poems to play with. While Hunt and Kilgour are now strongly bonded by this project, which musically is very good, I can’t help but feel it could have been more expressive to capture Hunt’s unique way of both writing and delivering his poems.
Nick

 

Posted by Nick Fulton under Album, Reviews
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