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.