The New Zealand duo of Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate have influenced generations of lo-fi rockers. This 55-track box set reminds us why.
The story of New Zealand rock music is a tale of isolation. For the young Kiwi musician, rock’n’roll was a familiar cultural language, but one separated by a whole lot of clear blue water. This distance engendered a degree of self-reliance, spawning bands, labels, and hyperlocal scenes, as well as a certain can-do sensibility. Thus was the case in 1981 when vocalist Chris Knox and guitarist Alec Bathgate—already veterans of two NZ bands, Dunedin punk upstarts the Enemy and the more polished, new-wave-inflected Toy Love—plugged in a TEAC 4-track reel-to-reel and started to record.
And record, and record. The level of fidelity would fluctuate over the years, but Tall Dwarfs—the absurdity of their chosen name characteristic of the duo’s artistic sensibility at large—never wholly lost their instinct for the homemade. The muse seemed to find them most naturally in bedrooms, front rooms, or the garden shed. Despite this, following their debut EP, Three Songs, they graduated to New Zealand’s trailblazing indie label Flying Nun, and the songs kept coming. They kept coming across seven EPs, six albums, and a couple of decades. Enough to fill Unravelled: 1981-2002, a 55-track box set that, despite its breadth, is relatively light on chaff.
It probably has a lot to do with the fact that Knox and Bathgate had bounced through a couple of groups already, but Tall Dwarfs fell out of the womb fully formed. The first track from Three Songs, “Nothing’s Going to Happen,” encapsulates a particularly Antipodean sense of ennui: a manic thrash of melodic guitar, smashed tambourines, and whacked xylophones, topped off with a lyric that wallows merrily in its own alienation. The means were rudimentary, but this did not imply a lack of ambition. Knox and Bathgate recorded its 12 layers by recording to their 4-track, bouncing out the tape, recording another four tracks on top, and repeating the process once more. The video—a stop-motion animation filmed in a grotty apartment that comes to life around the slovenly humans that call it home—showcases a similar sense of homemade ingenuity.
In the UK or U.S., you might find groups that made an entire career out of one corner of the Velvet Underground or Beatles catalog. Tall Dwarfs seem to ask: Why choose? Instead, their songs are crammed with styles and reference points, ricocheting between noise and melody, comedy and despair. “Crush” is powered by frayed guitar, pounding drums, and a wall of feedback, like the missing link between the Velvets’ “European Son” and Pavement’s Slay Tracks. But just as often the Dwarfs jury-rigged their rudimentary materials into works of peculiar beauty. Take “Carpetgrabber,” a hymn to hermetic living woven from piano, cymbal, triangle, and a drone of feedback; or “Paul’s Place,” a spry electronic shanty powered by bleepy synths and featuring a frantic percussion break which the credits reveal to have been played using a draining board, pan, and spoon.
Tall Dwarfs’ very existence felt like a conscious affront to the familiar rock-band format. Knox distilled the duo’s attitude in an interview with the New Zealand webzine Audioculture: “The bass player’s always the real muso of the group and thinks he knows everything, and the drummer is just a fuckwit, so it’s much easier to be without them.” In lieu of a rhythm section, Tall Dwarfs clapped their hands, stomped their feet, banged upon anything within reach. From 1983’s Canned Music EP on, their music was often underpinned by Knox’s tape loops, which accentuated their songs’ sense of cranky claustrophobia.
Unravelled is packaged with sleevenotes drawn in a comic-book style, detailing Tall Dwarfs’ history with a number of self-effacing asides. This playful presentation only slightly obscures the darkness in their music, which often grappled with small-town isolation and the feeling of being, if not quite a force of good in a world gone bad, at least shrewd enough to recognise one’s failings. “Life Is Strange,” from 1991’s Fork Songs, and “Entropy,” from 1994’s 3EPs, secrete a bleak nihilism within their breezy indie thrash. Elsewhere, tales of mundane existence are pockmarked by incidents of horror and the grotesque. On “Walking Home,” a drunken nighttime ramble is interrupted by an encounter with a man whose jaw has been sliced open. “Oatmeal,” meanwhile, is squalling freak-folk that revels in disgust: “The gulls above our heads are ill/They’ve eaten much more than their fill/Excreta plunges from the sky.”
Despite their music’s focus on a life of low horizons, Tall Dwarfs got a chance to see the world. In 1985 Bathgate went to live in London, before being driven home by the English weather. But as the 1990s dawned, Tall Dwarfs found their way to the United States, where they forged links with the incipient Stateside lo-fi movement. In 2009, after Knox was struck by a stroke that left him barely able to speak, artists including Will Oldham, Bill Callahan, Yo La Tengo, and Jeff Mangum came together to record a fundraising compilation, Stroke: Songs for Chris Knox.
Being an influence in this way is surely flattering, but it threatens to make you a footnote. Unravelled seeks to redress this imbalance, making the case for Tall Dwarfs as a group worthy of such a sprawling retrospective. There’s a lot of music here, maybe a little too much for the newcomer to digest, and it’s hard to deny their pretty, songwriterly moments have dated a touch better than their more raucous excursions. But when it works, Tall Dwarfs pull off a feat of alchemy. Around the back of the world, they took up makeshift instruments, wrote songs steeped in grit and gloom, and dropped something close to perfect pop straight onto a reel of magnetic tape.
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