‘Soft Bomb’: Hard Look at Rock

The Chills’ new album, “Soft Bomb,” doesn’t contain very much hard rock, but it has plenty to say about how hard rock can be as a career path for an idealist.

The band’s singer-songwriter, Martin Phillipps, certainly has the credentials to sing about persisting in the face of difficulties. He founded the Chills 12 years ago in the New Zealand port city of Dunedin, and has kept the band going despite an unceasing series of personnel changes. The lineup that appears tonight at the Coach House is completely revamped from the one that recorded “Submarine Bells,” the lovely, eloquent 1990 album that was the Chills’ first major-label release. In 12 years, the band has appeared in more than a dozen configurations, with Phillipps, his Al Stewart-like voice and his songs the only common denominator.

The current crew includes bassist Terry Moore, who is back after playing with the Chills in the early ‘80s, drummer Craig Akroyd and two American recruits, backing singer Steve Schayer and keyboards player Lisa Mednick.

“We’ve got a whole band together. I’m feeling very positive,” Phillipps, 29, said by phone Tuesday from a Hollywood hotel room.

“The single biggest problem so far has been just trying to keep bands together when we can’t afford to pay ourselves anything. It’s very hard for people (to stay). Every time we go on tour, things take off. Then the band breaks up, and we lose momentum. This time, we’re actually incorporating a wage into the tour budget.” With touring plans extending well into 1993, Phillipps feels that this version of the Chills is solid enough to sail in search of a wider audience.

Sailing is an apt metaphor. Hailing from an island nation, Phillipps works plenty of water into his lyrics. On the new Chills album, the thematic thread about rock as a choppy artistic voyage picks up with a song called “Ocean Ocean,” in which Phillipps hopefully surveys his prospects for riding through the swells and squalls and shifting currents of a musical journey.

On “Soft Bomb,” the title track, frustration emerges, as Phillipps, always a subtle, intelligent craftsman, scans the musical landscape and is appalled to find that it’s the blatant and brainless that seem in greatest demand:

So now a noise surrounds me--a million harsh guitars.

The same incessant dance beat--those harnessed, harmless stars.

“It’s kind of about the ideals that me and my peers used to have in Dunedin,” Phillipps said in a soft, quickly flowing voice, “and the practicalities and the problems of trying to stay true to ideals (given) the reality of what the international music industry is.”

Phillipps says he has nothing against “harsh guitars”--you can even hear a few of them on “Background Affair,” a track from the new album that’s both catchy and tough-sounding. But what he hears nowadays is an excess of harshness, and not enough of the subtler means he admires.

“I like that (loud) stuff, but I’m sick of the amount of people who are hiding behind it,” he said. “It’s an easy way of putting across a message and stirring up an audience in a very predictable manner. There are other ways of reaching people. (By playing) something large and atmospheric, you can have as much of an impact as bashing people on the head with loud guitars.”

On the album, Phillipps includes two reprises of “Soft Bomb,” each sounding like a desperate plea on behalf of his aesthetic ideals for rock.

Not everything on the album is about a rocker’s struggles.

“I don’t want to be known as somebody who can only write about their own problems,” Phillipps said, and to that effect the collection includes sketches of a trapped, abused wife, a psychotic killer and a mythic meditation, “Sleeping Giants,” that he said is drawn partly from the lore of the Maori, New Zealand’s native people.

At the same time, it’s rock lore that figures most prominently. On “Song for Randy Newman, Etc.,” the Chills pay homage to pop heroes whose innovating achievements have gone insufficiently recognized, or whose encounters with the music business have robbed them of sanity or life itself. Besides Newman, Phillipps’ sad honor roll includes the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett, the psychedelic explorer whose mind got shattered in lysergic inner space, Nick Drake, the fragile, haunting British folk-pop singer of the early ‘70s who may or may not have died a suicide, and Scott Walker of the Walker Brothers, a ‘60s band of American expatriates who had British hits but never found an audience in their own country.

The album’s mood spirals downward from there, ending with “Water Wolves,” wherein the good ship Chills has apparently been sunk, and Phillipps imagines himself surrounded by circling sharks.

Phillipps sees something positive in the song though.

“ ‘Water Wolves’ is not so much about death (itself not an infrequent Chills topic) as fear--fear of things that are hidden,” the songwriter said. “There are people who live their entire lives fearing the most ridiculous things.

“If I write a song about getting eaten by sharks, hopefully I won’t be,” he added lightly.

Phillipps has written often about the personal toll that life as a touring rocker can take, especially the way in which long separations erode relationships.

“I think it is insurmountable, pretty much,” he said. “I had my ex-girlfriend on tour for a while, and she ended up hating it. The big bands can afford to take their whole family on the road and be more comfortable. You’re talking about having to be as big as the Cure to do that properly.” For the Chills, he said, “that’s a long way off.”

In one of his new songs, “So Long,” Phillipps contemplates giving up all the striving of the rock biz for a more settled life where “everything’s simplified, no one persuading me to seek some prize that isn’t found anywhere.”

“That’s my dark side talking, which is there all the time,” he said. “But the more positive side is the predominant one, or I wouldn’t be here.”

With the new album out, and the most extensive touring in band history in the offing, Phillipps says, “it’s very much a period of personal assessment for me, (seeing) how much this is going to work. It won’t be the end, no matter what happens. There is a huge network of people who believe in what the Chills are about. I don’t want to walk away from the Chills until it’s sort of a finished story.”

The Chills, the Walkabouts and Smiling Face Down play tonight at 8 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $15. (714) 496-8930.