Vancouver based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Nicholas Krgovich shares “The Place Goes Quiet” – a warmhearted track inspired by the city of Los Angeles.

Krgovich began writing “The Hills” in a snow-covered hut in the Rocky Mountains in the winter of 2008, before taking to a relative’s lake house to write more. “I would write every day all day and then make dinner and watch 30 Rock at night,” he explains. Influenced by “what I guess people call sophistipop – Prefab Sprout, Talk Talk, The Blue Nile, Sade, music that makes me feel like I’m in the backseat of the car when I was a kid and it’s raining”, Krgovich gradually found songs coming together that told the stories of an “amalgam of characters that are at times acting out feelings or thoughts I’ve had. But often they’re off on their trip.”

Elsewhere on “The Hills”, there are moments of feather-delicate baroque darkness (‘Written In The Wind’), muted 1980s R&B (‘Lookout Point’) and slap-bass wig-outs packed with atonal horns (‘Out Of Work Jazz Singer’). If all this sounds eclectic, well, this is a man after all who as a child recreated the Phantom Of The Opera in his basement after family dinners, who bought his first cassette (Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin’) aged four and who later discovered and devoured the thrills of everything from grunge to 90s RnB. “I almost liked all music as a rule when I was young. No filters, no discernment,” he says now. Listening to the brilliantly varied The Hills, it seems not much has changed.

“The Hills” is something that Krgovich simply “wanted to share. In case people can get something out of it.” “The hills around the city, how they catch the light on warm nights, like when out of work actors go dancing and notice nothing of the kind,” he sings over avant-garde strings that leer from sad to sinister on the album’s melancholy closer. “I know I’m them sometimes.” A gorgeous head-rush of a trip through LA’s starry den of delinquents and successes, The Hills is an album full of faded dreams, and somewhere you’ll want to get lost in again and again.