Fancy shutting your eyes and riding out to the psychedelic pop frontier on a heavenly guitar riff or seven? Then David Kilgour is your man and his new Flying Nun CD David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights is your album.

In the minds of those who have already discovered his music - through two highly-acclaimed solo albums or a decade and a half spent in his record label's foremost act, The Clean, and other band projects - David Kilgour is one of those musicians with a timeless way with guitar and song.

The quietly-spoken songwriter whose dense guitar textures are woven with soft melodies that will catch you unawares has a place in the underground music canon between those, from Lou Reed to Alexander 'Skip' Spence, who have influenced him and those, like Pavement, who have acknowledged their own debt to David Kilgour's music.

All the way from Dunedin, where he surfs his days away when not writing songs, to the pages of Billboard, the New York Times, and Melody Maker, David's albums Here Come The Cars (1991) and Sugarmouth (1994) have both been praised as shimmering jewels crafted with elements from ambient, modern and 'sixties sounds.

After those two albums, David Kilgour and the Heavy Eights comes as close to perfecting the Kilgour sound as you'd want. From the surreal lope of opener, "Round the Bend", into some impressive Neil Young-ish guitarathons including "Diggin' For Gold" and "Cut Me In Half", and a couple of concise little gems thrown in for good measure, David heads further out from the easy melodic flow of those first two albums into a rockier and often enjoyably loose musical terrain.

The album's production by David Kilgour and regular cohort Nick Roughan (Bailterspace, Superette producer) wraps a massive wash of warm alrightness around this set of blissed-out songs. David's guitar plays bandleader throughout, leading Robert Key (drums) and Noel Ward (bass) in each song while his singing mixes soft yearning and a Dylan-like nasal disdain with its calm hold on an opaque lyrical web. Regular bursts of keyboards, guest vocals on the sublime "Locked In Blue" from American singer Barbara Manning, and Greg Johnson's trumpet on "Maybe", add some melodic embellishment and yet more warm layers to the Heavy Eights' solid riffing until the album closes with David at the piano on the instrumental "Tumbalin".

David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights have just spent five weeks touring America with Yo La Tengo, another band who specialise in quietly transcendent moments. A regular visitor to the U.S. on tours either as David Kilgour or in The Clean (his brother and Clean drummer, Hamish, incidentally played in the Heavy Eights on this tour) David has a loyal fanbase out there. The album has been released in America to coincide with the tour; in its first two weeks on American radio, it was the #4 most-added record to college stations reporting to the Gavin Chart.

An equally warm reception for this album at local radio and from audiences for November's David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights tour would be no less than the unassuming Mr Kilgour deserves. For his enduring artistry marks David Kilgour as a heavyweight champion in our rock underground and this album is a sweet knock-out.