KEVIN PURDY – HUNDREDS & THOUSANDS: REVIEW
- Dec 4, 2025
- 3 min read
KEVIN PURDY
Hundreds & Thousands (Soft Records)
AS TITLES GO, this one is accurate in more ways than one: from the probable number of samples found/sample-ready sounds made, and the bright and colourful elements poured on, to the childlike glee in the song titles that is reflected in the entertainment within, and the likelihood that some killjoy would argue there is no obvious nutritional value while you’re too busy stuffing yourself to care.
The last time Kevin Purdy – who once was only Purdy when his records arrived but eventually could not resist the urge to be the Kevin he was always meant to be – was spotted in these pages it was with an album of cinematic psychedelia. And before that he was working on the edges of ambience and jazz. In some ways the only obvious connection was that Purdy played most if not all the instruments, though eventually you realised the sonic inventions written not just stumbled upon played in the same exploratory music universe.
This time? Some of those earlier moves are detectable, of course, but Hundreds & Thousands is more playful, more bitsy, more rock-y and more pop-y. How much? Well, there’s a surf movie candidate in It Feels Like Hot Water, though this movie is from 1964 and is more likely to feature Frankie Avalon than Rabbit Bartholomew – all twang and hi-hat, stomping and mashed potato, with a few random voices, as if Eric Von Zipper’s Rats have stumbled into the party.
Earlier in the album, Hey! Anybody Here? could conceivably have come from around the same period, though this time it’s a black-and-white science-fiction film with wonky special effects but genuinely disturbing alien interactions. Purdy offers echoey mechanics and spooky electronics, the appearance and disappearance of a rapid bassline while machines clank, ground control confused and flight deck panicking, and another voice intoning the dispassionate summary of mankind in flux.
The samples are amusing, so for example the order made at the beginning of I’ll Have A Plate Of Prawns Please makes me giggle every time (which may say more about me, I know), but the cleverness in construction is what sustains, as anyone who has ever listened to say, The Avalanches – a comparison not made casually – would know. In that same song, there is a carnival containing a threatened car crash of a dance which emerges from a blend of rock band devolving and string quartet assaulting, and the movement feels natural rather than stapled together.
Similarly, what seems like a haphazard slam of elements in Give The Bass Player Some –children’s toys, man-as-kazoo and a cheap rhythm box, sloshed percussion, swinging jazz bass and poked piano – ends up feeling like a slice of Lex Baxter’s exotica somehow being danced to by men and women in formal wear.
I don’t know that my amusement is ever sustained through Cat And Mouse, which is somewhere between a 1950s television detective show and the incidental music from HR Pufnstuf but just seems to go on, and conversely, the title track’s 28 seconds of bing and clang to close the record is gone before it has a chance to be something other than a palate cleanser without a follow-up dish. But the energy and wit of a track like A Heart Bigger Than This Room, which merges elements of both Cat And Mouse and Hundreds & Thousands, makes up for that.
Serve this up at your next party? I’d suggest not pairing it with the red cordial – let’s just say the other parents will curse you later in the afternoon and may retaliate by giving your kid a drum kit at the next birthday – but jeez, you’ll keep the easily bored and the happily destructive occupied for a good while.
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APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Kevin Purdy – Hundreds & Thousands
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