Perhaps the most widely known and beloved combo of New Zealand's '80s indie-pop boom, Dunedin's Chills — led by singer/writer/guitarist Martin Phillipps — made clean, understated, catchy music whose consistent taste and subtlety conspired to keep the band from having real commercial success in this country. At its best, the Chills' work boasted an undercurrent of dark uneasiness that clearly marked it as a vehicle for personal expression rather than mere genre exercise. Guitars may twinkle like harps and jangle over angelically whispery vocals, but the love songs are never gooey. Gooey bands do not write lines like "Oh god this white ward stinks, sterilized stench of sticky death, sniveling relatives at the feet of another moist corpse, but that corpse is Jayne and Jayne can't die" (from Brave Words' "16 Heart-throbs"). Soppy sentimentalists aren't honest enough to admit "I'd like to say how I love you but it's all been said in other songs" as Phillipps does on the same album's "Night of Chill Blue."

The Chills write mostly love songs. They love women, rain, the Otago Peninsula at the southern tip of New Zealand's southern island and their leather jackets. They even love to be hurt because out of hurt comes growth. They love cool, clean production with sparkling high notes, keeping just enough homestyle dustiness to avoid slickness.

Kaleidoscope World, which collects most of the band's early singles and compilation tracks, is the cornerstone of New Zealand pop. Phillips, as well as the members of the Clean, had been among the first local musicians to explore the DIY ethic of punk, and "Kaleidoscope World" had appeared in 1982 on the Dunedin Double 12-inch EP with Chris Knox of the Clean. With its ebullient and utopian vision of girls, electric guitars and happy solitude, the song typifies the Chills at their most optimistic. "We go for a swim in the deep of space / A thousand colours reflect off your face / The stars surround us as we sail on through our kaleidoscope world." Astronomical and meteological motifs of space, rain and weather would continue to appear through Phillips' work. The Homestead CD of Kaleidoscope World adds The Lost EP and four more tracks. If nothing else, the record — in any format — is worth owning for the band's masterpiece, 1982's "Pink Frost," one of the most haunting songs about death ever recorded by a pop group. The bracingly electric "I Love My Leather Jacket" is another tribute, to early bandmember Martyn Bull, who died of leukemia at the age of 22 in 1983. It was a sizable hit in New Zealand and crossed over to England via the support of John Peel and the NME.

The Chills were formed as a singles band, and initially seemed lost in the long-player format. Brave Words, the band's first proper album, is disappointingly flawed, but still contains such gems as "House With 100 Rooms" and "Wet Blanket." The stop-start jangle of "Rain" is impressively grand, with an almost martial discipline interrupted by Phillips' falsetto chorus and declamatory verses. Caroline Easther, who joined the band on percussion for this album only, adds backing vocals. Mayo Thompson of Red Krayola and Pere Ubu produced.

By the time the group — at this point a quartet with bassist Justin Harwood (later of New York's Luna), keyboardist Andrew Todd and drummer James Stephenson — clinched a deal with Slash to release Submarine Bells in the States, the Chills had evolved a mature, restrained and affectingly personal approach that belied its original reputation as a singles band. Sympathetically produced by Gary Smith, Submarine Bells graduates the Chills from being just a first-rate singles band. Andrew Todd's ghostly keyboards abound on such graceful yet eerie gems like "Effloresce and Deliquesce"; a tinge of knowing, slow heartbreak slings its way through "Part Past Part Fiction" and "Don't Be — Memory." Others, like the should-have-been-a-smash "Heavenly Pop Hit" (quite) and the splendorous title track, show a decided late-'60s Brian Wilson influence. And for all of the Chills' charm, pristine textures and cool atmosphere, Phillipps' roots in late-'70s punk still show in such uncharacteristic blasters as "The Oncoming Day" and "Familiarity Breeds Contempt."

Recorded in Los Angeles with a largely American cast (including Peter Holsapple, Lisa Mednick and Clay Idols leader Steve Schayer), the conceptually ambitious Soft Bomb finds Phillipps addressing personal themes while producing some of his most engaging music to date. The romantic "Double Summer" and the rueful "The Male Monster From the Id" take on tricky inter-gender issues, while "Song for Randy Newman Etc." movingly ponders the role of the artist in a philistine culture without condescension or self-congratulation, name-checking such kindred spirits as Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, Scott Walker and Nick Drake. Van Dyke Parks' haunting orchestral arrangement for "Water Wolves" accentuates the song's chilling fatalism.

After touring behind Soft Bomb, Phillipps announced that he was putting the band name to rest and would henceforth release records under his own name. But the first thing to appear was the Pop Art Toasters EP, in which Phillipps and fellow New Zealand scene veterans David Kilgour and Noel Ward proffer five fluffy covers of obscure and semi-obscure vintage pop gems by the Who, Avengers and other English and American bands.

Named after the band's best-known song, Heavenly Pop Hits is a generous career-spanning compilation that chronicles the Chills at their best and brightest. However, the band's best early singles are on Kaleidoscope World as well, so there's a lot of redundancy. Ice Picks, a bonus CD of alternate mixes, accompanied some of the New Zealand pressings.

With the break-up of his band and resulting financial strife, Phillipps fell into depression, drugs and a long hiatus from recording. Sunburnt was credited to Martin Phillipps and the Chills, but the distinction is largely irrelevant. The album encountered problems from the start: Phillipps' New Zealand musicians were unable to get visas to join him and record in London. (Session players were hired to fill in.) The most notable difference in the sound is more keyboards in the mix. The closest Phillipps ever got to a Go-Betweens record, it features such fine songs as "Swimming in the Rain" and "The Big Assessment," but lacks the drive of the best of the band's singles. The moving "Come Home" is a seeming appeal to New Zealand's expatriates in the UK, USA and Australia to return to their homeland and rejoin the national life.

Phillipps' enormous collection of home recordings was partly unearthed in 1999 with the release of Sketchbook and the daunting Secret Box, three CDs of rarities.