Steve Kilbey & The Winged Heels The Hall Of Counterfeits
Release Date: August 25, 2023
Label: Easy Action
The Church's Steve Kilbey along with his other band, the Winged Heels welcome you into The Hall Of Counterfeits, a sprawling piece of work that revels in its own originality.
Already riding high due to the success of the Church’s February 2023 comeback album The Hypnogogue and its subsequent two US tours, The Hall Of Counterfeits is the latest solo album from the Australian band’s head honcho, Steve Kilbey, Available for the first time outside of his home country, where it was released to high critical acclaim as arguably his finest solo work to date, The Hall Of Counterfeits is available as a remastered 2CD set in deluxe gatefold sleeve with full color 16 page booklet featuring photos of the band in the studio recording the album. That band being the high-flying Winged Heels - Gareth Koch, Roger Mason, and Barton Price.
Kilbey explains the album in a way only he can. “In 1990 I released a sprawling double album called Remindlessness in which I attempted to take in everything I had ever been fascinated by in my life and reconcile the whole damn lot with a weird and wild bunch of songs far from the mainstream and its tepid commercial tripe that informed me of absolutely nothing. Well, one could see The Hall Of Counterfeits as my answer to myself. 30 years on, armed with three brilliant musicians, time has enabled me to give voice to those same preoccupations: past lives, Indian and Middle Eastern music, religion, ancient history, the Beatles and the many implications of their work. Myth, magic, drugs, chaos and order, spirit, good and evil, love and hatred…well it’s all there.”
But it’s not all as esoteric as Kilbey makes it sound. Even if you’re simply a fan of the Church’s well-known radio hits like “Under The Milky Way,” there’s plenty on the new album that you’ll dig, like “Swinging On The Moon” and the perfect pop and sardonic wit of “Everything’s For Sale.” That being said, there’s plenty of psychedelic weirdness going on here too with tracks like “Horizon Meets The Ground” and “Karnak.”
Kilbey concludes that The Hall Of Counterfeits is “the record I had to make before I shuffle off this mortal coil and begin again all over – some other time, some other place.”
Just don’t leave us anytime soon, Steve.