Steve and the Women: The Return of the Troubadour

At first, when I saw the title “Eleven Women”, I thought of girlfriends, wives, mothers or daughters, lovers, all the usual women men often struggle with during their lives. But this album is not quite what you might expect, these women appear in different disguises as birds, playing cards, witches, biblical figures or religious concepts, or only as a number in a long row, literary and historical figures, women who have been furtively loved, despised or passionately adored; fiction and reality as always shaken, not stirred, in the both refreshing and intoxicating cocktail of the gospel of female adoration by Steve Kilbey.

The album opens in a miniature guitar sketch of History, soon to be followed by the once-upon-a-time storytelling sound of instruments preparing to make up the most colourful anecdotes of the female presence in a personal life. The story of Steve and the women begins …

This is by no means, – somewhat surprisingly perhaps -, a sentimental account of relationships between a he and a she, but it puts the female figure (not in the sense of her bodily shape though, not exclusively anyway) on a pedestal made of mystery, respect, love, fear, humour, tenderness and even worship. “Eleven Women” is more about the ungraspable myth of femininity, about the many archetypical faces of the female, than about personal encounters with the other sex. Perhaps there lies just a very thin line between a cliché and an archetype, but Steve Kilbey effortlessly grasps the difference and avoids almost all the traps of the female cliché. Big sigh of relief! It’s refreshing and different.

Steve Kilbey makes his appearance as the 21st-century reincarnation of the medieval troubadour, who is a poet and a composer. A troubadour is simply somebody who makes things up, with great passion – I have perhaps never found a word which captures so well the essence of Kilbey’s being, making things up, both musically and poetically, fabricating a musical world which suits the imagination and our need to escape from a well-defined reality, as a glove. He finds and invents unusual wordings, strange concoctions of ideas, anachronistic settings of persons and things, topsy-turvy experiences in time and space, yet it all makes perfect sense… most of the time.

Many of the songs are born in little romantic or idyllic preludes, tiny, pregnant wombs, beginnings as delicate aubades to a new morning, a new acquaintance. The wonderfully girly album cover is full of references to nature, flowers, leaves, birds, butterflies, fruits and fish,.. being savoured by full red lips and green eyes that look in all directions. It’s clear that She’s an enigma, in the Nabokovian sense, in “the flowering walled prison of the world” – maybe the only cliché Kilbey allowed himself, performing at the cyber court of the internet.

And the music is a noble and ceremonious witness to this courteous expression of a very idiosyncratic adoration of womanhood. The music travels through time in a majestically sounding historical flight, which perfectly reflects the archetypical essence and content of Steve’s songwriting, its instinctive nature. The music is made of sounds which seem to embrace the same universal, symbolic patterns of the kind of imagery that derives from past collective experiences and which is present in the individual unconscious, the music is often infused with a spiritual matter delved out of the deepest dreamed up recesses of history and time, insofar as it is being imagined by the musicians’ touches, and it evolves organically into classic storytelling. It has got something strangely and freshly eternal. Yet it resonates so perfectly with the present; it brings out the eternal nature of the archetype and transports it to the here and now in a magnificent embodiment of a possible form of archetypical music. Any authentic music is capable of reaching out to those ‘primitive’ mental images which are the foundations of all classic stories and the music celebrating these eleven women, accompanied by the commanding voice of Steve Kilbey, certainly achieves this. Koch’s sounds and Kilbey’s ideas merge into something naturally evident, into a perfectly unified motif of music and poetry. Nevertheless the music changes its mind – and is always right – just as its subjects: at times it takes off its historical makeup and reveals its date of birth showing its bare face of youth in a lighter pop or rock. The whole thing is alive with a naturally, rhythmically occurring, breathing arrangement. Nothing artificial about it. It holds the excitement and the spontaneity of the present moment. A mature, fully grown fruit of the instant. An astounding resourcefulness of simple, yet essential ideas and materials only made possible through the purest and finest of skills. If there ever was a code of chivalry for music instruments… a poetical invention of knightly ideals of generosity and courtesy for the art of the Song…

An unmediated classic!

So many beautiful women, far-away princesses between reality and imagination. Josephine rises up from behind the window of a splendid fin de siècle palace – with heavy dark red curtains and decadently rich furniture reflected in the lush diamond sound of the mandolin -, gazing at the perfectly groomed endless green garden. You can feel her sadness as she retreats to her bedchamber all alone…

I love the hybrid identity of the bird-woman, called Birdeen, a creature giving birth to music, naturally and liberally, freely. The connection between music and the female muse seems evident, yet it’s very ingeniously and subtly translated by Steve Kilbey through these songs about 11 women; not your usual womaniser or libertine, he behaves as a Don Juan only towards the music itself, exploring any genre he’ s attracted to, an obliging, willing victim himself to the games of seduction of music. The webs of seduction on this album are, to say the least, manifold, inextricable and unusual. Music and women in a happily erotic, lively union in the poetry of the imagination.

Memories of a woman in blue, like in a delicious trance. A jolly sing-along with a child-woman in a festive party atmosphere complete with some acclaim of the audience for the minstrel; it sounds like a scene spontaneously unfolding at a Kilbey family or friends gathering: Steve Kilbey is a born entertainer juggling music and poetry as he pleases for all who want to listen and what could be a more suitable subject to muse about for this modern-day troubadour? He brings us his music through the acquiescing waves of the internet, without decorum, his music is born out of an endless, open universe of skies, in an ethereal dimension as an immaculate conception, – Steve Kilbey always respecting a gentlemanly distance between himself and the women -, a Minnesinger needing no stage, nor studio, just a room and a guitar. The dark woman of the woods, Doris McAllister, – appearing out of some ancient fairytale filled with the sombre, bare forms of branches and trees and an oppressive sky above -, leading us to the most enchanting road away from all evil, to “Where Gloria meets Rachel”, to me the most beautiful song on this momentous album, introduced by the most glorious, dense cluster of entwined sounds, a labyrinth opening up to a hope-filled future; of a simple, circular, perfect beauty, bells, strings and skins giving off the purest of sounds. And when the memories of all these women are in danger of fading away, the music will be silent too, no rhythm, no rhyme, no melody, no beat left for the poet, only his thoughts as a consolation. And only the most wonderful ballad withstanding the menace of emptiness and loss…

This is once more an album offering an earnest and pleasurable meditation on the subject of music… out of the blue…of a dress, a sky, or a pair of eyes…maybe…

Joke Roelandt, September 2020