NICHOLAS KRGOVICH
Vancouver pop dissembler completes his dreamlike R&B trilogy salute to Hollywood.
Nicholas Krgovich still remembers visiting Universal Studios in 1994. Back then, the Vancouver native was just 13, and, like most kids, stared wide-eyed as the Universal tram ferried him past the Back To The Future clock-tower and the Psycho house down to “Amity Harbour” for a hydraulic attack from a past-his-best shark called Jaws. However, there was one strange and magical vision that wasn’t on the list. “There was a really long escalator that descended down to the backlot,” remembers Krgovich, “and I just had this very pure tingle of excitement looking out over this horizon of rectangular buildings, where people were working and things were happening. I wasn’t a part of it, I was apart from it, and it felt exciting and weird.” This banal, eerie vision, the anonymous sprawl of hangars and soundstages behind the rides and the tourist attractions, stayed with Krgovich. It’s there at the heart of his most recent project, a bewitching trilogy of albums that chronicle the lonely lives of the dreamers and drifters who inhabit the side-roads and backhills of Hollywood. “I’ve always had a long-standing attraction to this weird factory city where people make pop culture,” says Krgovich. “There’s a lot of yearning to be a part of this dreamy and ambiguous thing that also seems troubling and full of contradictions and the intangible.” The idea was formed in the winter of 2008, when, on the way to the Banff Centre, a songwriting residency in the Rocky Mountains, Krgovich bought the annual Vanity Fair Hollywood issue. He was tickled by the gap between the two worlds when “making a record about Hollywood while deer tiptoed outside my window”. It was, says Krgovich, a chance to work outside of his comfort zone, something he’s repeatedly done since the late ’90s, composing post-modern miniatures with Vancouver chamber-pop quartet P:ano, Brill Building girl-group art project Gigi, and the lonesome R&B-inspired show tunes he wrote with P:ano offshoot, No Kids. “I have a strong attraction to the process of trying to unpack what’s going on,” explains Krgovich. “Not to try and make sense of it, though. I like things that confuse and make my heart jump.” The Hollywood idea, however, became Krgovich’s biggest unpacking problem. It took the multi-instrumentalist six years before On Sunset, the first album of the trilogy, appeared in 2014. A gauzy melancholy blend of ’70s soul pleading, sweet female backing vocals, and lonely latenight ’80s soul, inspired by “Sunset Boulevard, heavy and sticky nights and broken dreams…”, On Sunset was quickly followed by 2015’s On Cahuenga, where Krgovich re-recorded On Sunset ’s multilayered, wide-screen cityscape narratives in an afternoon, for just voice and electric piano. Now we have The Hills. Recorded in Vancouver with Colin Stewart (Black Mountain) and mixed with John Collins (Destroyer, New Pornographers), The Hills is like a zoom-lens close-up on certain details and characters from On Sunset. Krgovich only ever performs these songs solo in the US but in March he will be playing songs from the trilogy in the UK with his UK bandmates Mason Le Long, Joe Carvell, and Matt Rheeston from Batsch. After that, he’ll be back in the studio to start work on a new project. “It’s time,” says Krgovich, “to smash it all on the floor and start again.”