Steve Kilbey & Martin Kennedy

In 1981 a teenage Martin Kennedy stumbled upon Steve Kilbey and The Church at a strange hybrid hippie/new wave festival in Aus tralia and fell in love with their look and sound. He recorded their set on a walkman, and the songs helped spark the beginning of his music career. Just a year before, an equally fresh-faced Steve Kilbey formed The Church in Sydney, the very beginning of their public life as accidental hit makers. Twenty-nine years later Kilbey & Kennedy find themselves working together on Unseen Music/Unheard words, without any fanfare and virtually no prior planning. It was simple: Kennedy wrote the music and Kilbey wrote the words. No argument, no egos, just a matter of pressing the record button. The results are an effective balancing of Kennedy’s haunting and melodic tunes with Kilbey’s witty and intelligent lyrics, melded together by his heavenly voice. Unseen Music / Unheard Words echos the ambient sounds of Air, Thievery Corporation meeting the space-rock vocals of The Church. From the opening track “Eyes Ahead” to twelve tracks in with “Friends Are Gone” the album wraps around you like a warm blanket or as one writer in their native Australia put it “Kilbey’s voice complements the ambient sounds so welll, he wraps his velvety smooth lungs around the words like a boa constrictor going in for the kill, and you’re hypnotized by his voice so much that you don’t even realize that the life is being squeeze out of you.