The Real New Tall

Sign the Dotted Line
Life Is Strange

David Bowie quipped that only 100 people bought The Velvet Underground and Nico when it was originally released, but every one of them started a band. The same event must have been duplicated some years later in New Zealand. Aside from some elusive, creativity-fostering element in the water table, it remains an open question as to how a vibrant pop underground took foothold in that breakaway republic. Local radio loved catering to middling Australian tastes, and NZ didn’t possess the press-fed frenzy of the British scene. There were universities where the like-minded could meet, and a few record stores to score product, but distro on the other side of the world was less than ideal -- case in point, there were no Joy Division records available until after Ian Curtis’ suicide. New Zealand pop stands, then, as another example of how widespread indifference paradoxically inspires winning performances from of the unlikeliest contenders.

Warm, intimate, and often cracked, the music fostered by the Flying Nun and Xpressway labels churned out an impressive body of work in the 80’s, the quality of which often transcends its continued obscurity. The kiwi contingent labored over their home recordings, keeping an eye on both economy and artistry, adding just the right amount of scuzz and sneer to acknowledge punk rock’s paradigm shift. Years before Pavement and Guided By Voices deconstructed pop songs in their hovels, the New Zealand underground produced the same results with surprising consistency. The Clean got the first local hit, but still never made it beyond critical nods and a small fanbase stateside. They had their brief revival a few years ago when Merge threw together two CDs’ worth of back catalogue highlights as Anthology, garnering college radio attention and inspiring a US tour. These days posthumous acclaim spreads as fast as a couple of mouse clicks. Cloud Recordings aims to reproduce that reissue's success for the Tall Dwarfs, this month reissuing their first two LPs, Weeville and Fork Songs.

Tall Dwarfs started in ’81, the same year as Flying Nun, and were comprised of two members from the New Wave band Toy Love, Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate. They recorded everything at home on TEAC four track and put together their own record covers and promotional materials. Guitars, some drum sticks (if not actual drums), and a Casiotone are all they needed to string together melody and lyric into pop songs, sneering satire, and genre-stretching experiments.

-- Here are the young men. The picture suggests the mien of Tall Dwarfs to be variously uncomfortable, defiant, self-aware, and oblivious. Bathgate looks like Lance Armstrong fielding testicle questions from hostile French sportswriters. To his right stands Knox, looking unamused for once. He usually resembles Richard D. James' older brother (see: the photo at the beginning of this post). Here, he seems to want to evoke Lemmy, and not merely ape him, as so many others have. Like Knox’s music, the ‘stache idiosyncratically conjures something from the storebin of cultural awareness, made even more estranged from its already marginal source.

The Tall Dwarfs had been plying their trade in EPs until 1990, when the Weeville LP was released. Given that background, the odds-and-sods nature of the album’s flow is understandable. As an example of this kind of dichotomy, “The Winner” weds Superchunk pogo to a string of nasty putdowns, culminating in one of the Dwarfs goading the listener into a barfight over the song's fade. This is followed by “Rorschach,” an oddly affecting ballad of delicate guitar and creeped-out keyboards. The track offered above, “Sign the Dotted Line,” is an anthem for the year punk broke, when the nascent indie rock met mainstream and only a few got a lasting deal (Sonic Youth comes to mind as faring the best). The lyrics seem to presage the indie rock era perfectly, constant considerations undercutting any buoyancy that threatens to raise their spirits. Underachievers, attack at your leisure.

Giving themselves a year to think about it, the Dwarfs returned in ’91 with their second LP, Fork Songs. The first song, “Dare to Tread,” gets down to business immediately, laying out the band’s blueprint in its four and a half minutes: jaunty rhythm guitar, anthemic riffs recorded flat, arch lyrics, and cardboard box drumming. Fourteen variations on the theme later, the shrugging closer "Think Small" engages in some quiet defeatism, catchy for all its ineffectual sullenness. In between the Dwarfs splatter their canvas with everything heard on Weeville, refined slightly with another year’s maturity; cheesy percussion loops are mixed lower, guitarwork is more tasteful, the balance between anger and resignation tipping decidedly toward the latter. In general the two sound more comfortable with their limitations, at points flat-out mellow. “We Bleed Love” is from head to toe verifiably a Dump song -- one can easily imagine James McNew hunched over his Hello Kitty boombox, trying to figure out the chords. The appended Dogma EP predates Weeville by two years, and is decidedly more ramshackle, kicking things off with a spoken word piece and utilizing more found sounds and tape pastichery. The centerpiece is "The Slide," a slow burner of zinging, pro-euthanasia couplets (summing with the droll assessment, "The doctor should kill / She's terminally ill"). The most successful gambit is "Dog"'s funk-spazz-pop, multi-tracking allowing the Dwarfs to come across as a no-budget Talking Heads.

“Life Is Strange” shares a similar approach with “Dotted Line,” in that both songs share the same gradual enfolding of electric guitar heroism for maximum – minimalist – impact (Guided By Voices used this trick endlessly during their basement years). “Life” is more straightforward rocker, but with chintzy percussion and no low end to speak of, its demo-sized effect is considerably less than suggested. That’s all part of their charm, though, the Tall Dwarfs living up, and down, to their name.

[Weeville and Fork Songs are out October 25th on Cloud Recordings.]