Or, most specifically, about the stupendous single "Pink Frost" included on the Kaleidoscope World compilation. Easily one of the top 10 singles from that decade, "Pink Frost" has a cascading waterfall guitar sound (or is it underwater?) that is hypnotic and seductive. In near-deadpan vocals, Martin Phillipps sings a song of lost love. Well, that's lost lover; once you wrap your head around the lyrics you realize the narrator has murdered his girl. That's right, an Eminem forefather by 15 years and without all the nasty words.

"Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived." That's the mnemonic we historian types use to remember the fates of Henry VIII's wives. "Lineup changes, great songs, an early drummer died. Lineup changes, great songs, somehow Martin and the Chills survived" might be something similar for the Chills.

Now, 20 years on, and at least as many band iterations later, Phillipps has released an impressive three-CD compilation of rarities, Secret Box. Clocking in at over three-and-a-half hours, let me state the obvious and say, there's a lot here. Striking, nay mouth-agape shock, is that there are about 70-75 songs I'd never heard or heard of previously. Even if not everything is the equivalent of "Pink Frost" -- or, more fairly, the equivalent of "I Love My Leather Jacket," "Don't Even Know Her Name," "Song for Randy Newman etc" or "Familiarity Breeds Contempt" -- that still leaves the equivalent of four or five "new" Chills albums. Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and Snuffleupagus.

Eschewing fancy packaging to minimize production, and thus retail, costs, Secret Box has been self-released by Phillipps in a run of 500 individually numbered and signed copies. It's available via the official Chills website, www.softbomb.com. (Secret Box is housed in a single jewel box with a flap inlay to hold two of the discs. Unfortunately in shipping, all three CD holders on mine broke so if you see a similar style jewel box for sale, let me know and I'll reimburse you from my DAA salary.) Who needs scads of ill-scanned photos and liner notes tossed off by Craig Marks or some other meathead critic anyway? The inlay, fully annotated by Phillipps is plenty.

Each track has Phillipps' comments on its lyrics, origin or, more interestingly, its fate in not previously seeing the light of day. The 19 lineups, so far, are listed so you can reference who played on which track. In brief introductory comments, Phillipps notes that there was material enough for two or even three albums before what came to be the band's full-length debut, Brave Words, after a small passel of singles and an EP. Early completed songs included at least two standout tracks that later appeared on the band's 1990 Slash/Warner debut, Submarine Bells. I guess the lesson here is that a song saved is a song saved for future aural delights.

The first two discs in the compilation are mostly live recordings from New Zealand clubs or radio sessions, with a handful of studio outtakes at the end of disc two. Culled basically from '81-'86, these songs touch all the bases that Phillipps has in his musical repertoire, from complex pop to just-this-side-of-punk speed. The stage was obviously the place for exploration of an extremely fertile creative mind. Unfortunately handicapped by his rotating band mates, Phillipps writes that he had many song "seeds" that one line-up would get comfortable playing only to have to start again with new players.

Even in these seeds, the themes for Chills fans are recognizable: standing in the face of adversity, life and how it's lived, hipsters and how to relate, love's labors, and the Flinstones. Okay, maybe not the last one, but included here is a not-yet-animated body-snatching vignette for the cartoon that put the "rock" in rock 'n' roll. As some of the familiar titles (and even the unfamiliar ones) went through several lyric re-writes, one can only imagine the spare rooms full of Phillipps' composition books. His songs jam fully realized phrases and sentences into verses leading to the tongue-twisting trips of "The Oncoming Day." And with a vocabulary one might expect from fellow Kiwi (and Harvard alum) Dean Wareham, Phillipps regularly employs three-plus syllable words, probably more often than anyone else, sending a listener to (gasp) a dictionary every so often. [Ed: See vocabulary list.]

It's a definition of pop that too small a handful of artists have embraced, to say nothing of radio programmers who feel obliged to promote songs to the lowest common denominator, or, more aptly, the largest bust denominator. It's a combination of words and music that makes one, in this era of the CD, hit the repeat button or turn up the volume. On the sublime Submarine Bells, released in 1990 by Slash in the U.S., the album opens with "Heavenly Pop Hit" referencing the sun in several of its incarnations from the splendor of sunset, to the blinding light and, vaguely, to the myth of Icarus. In my effort to engage in a little Chills marketing, a friend (call him C.) to whom I lent Submarine Bells years ago was smitten by "Heavenly Pop Hit." Who wouldn't be?

A collection for the fans, Secret Box includes more than its fair share of outtakes, bootleg-quality recordings, covers, compilation tracks and commercial jingles. You read that right. Phillipps was commissioned to do work for the likes of Coca-Cola and a local radio station. Forget the tired "selling out" argument (music is musicians' livelihoods so why can't they make money off of their creativity?) -- I'd rather hear a Chills song for Chevy trucks than one by Bob Seger. Okay, so my wish won't come true, but here's hoping.