New Zealand lo-fi trailblazers Tall Dwarfs aren’t a band—as their 1985 compilation The Short & Sick of It (on legendary Flying Nun Records) shows, they have a lot in common with St. Petersburg, Florida, teenager and short-wave radio enthusiast Betty Klenck, who heard Amelia Earhart calling for help from half a world away in early July 1937.
Which is to say they’re pulling in sounds from far, far away. Or perhaps it would be better to say Tall Dwarfs ARE a short wave radio, one that picks up melodies that are bouncing around in the ether, fugitive, fleeting, just waiting for someone to transcribe them the way young Betty Klenck took careful notes of Earhart’s distress calls in her diary.
In this, Tall Dwarfs have a lot in common with Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard, who seems like more of a receiver than a songwriter. There are melodies floating around out there, and there are artists who are tuned into whatever mystical frequency you can hear them on. Tall Dwarfs are a stranger proposition than Guided by Voices, less a traditional rock and roll band, but the analogy stands.
Tall Dwarfs are Chris Knox and Alex Bathgate, and to say their bailiwick is cool melodies is to limit them, as you can hear on The Short & Sick of It, which compiles one single and one EP. They do all kinds of things; one of the coolest songs on the LP is “Get Outta the Garage,” a blast of fuzzed-out punk garage that has some Beatles in its DNA. And jokers that they are, following track “Scrapbook” picks up where “Getta Outta My Garage” lets off (although the lyrics are different) before it morphs into a lovely acoustic guitar workout that sounds like, well, it was received from some secret corner of the galaxy where fugitive Beatles melodies float around, waiting to be picked up by the human ham radio that is Tall Dwarfs.
The Tall Dwarfs have never had a drummer—they prefer to play with whatever makeshift percussion instruments (or non-instruments) they think will sound best on a particular song. (Their Merge Records site mentions “pans, chairs, baby rattles.”) That said, I hear drums on the single “Nothing’s Going to Happen,” a lo-fi catchy ditty that is part Beatles, part Beach Boys, and all Tall Dwarfs. It opens with some nonsense singing, then this big electric guitar comes in and the song shuffles along at a healthy clip, and lo-fi or not, the sound is BIG, Beach Boys orchestral, lovely. It’s a thing of beauty, especially when the drums really come in and the boys sing, well, I have no idea what they’re singing, except to say that at one point Knox runs through half of the alphabet. It could be an outtake from Pet Sounds, this one, pure surf loveliness that it is. And it seems to go on forever.
The flip side of the single, “Nothing’s Going to Stop It” is the A-side slowed down, with Knox droning his way through the lyrics in a monotone way that is deliberately annoying, because if there’s one thing you can say about Tall Dwarfs it’s they live by the credo “Why suffer for our art when you can do it for us?” The Beach Boys melodies come back, you get lots of weird organ noise and some very Beatlesesque George Martin studio hijinks, and all the while Knox grows increasingly crazed, like he’s channeling Syd Barrett on a particularly florid afternoon. The song is surpassingly strange, but also completely addictive. And it has a pay-off at the end, when the drums kick in and the boys mutter and sing a snatch of melody before shutting things down.
“Gone to the Worms” proceeds at a rush, all fuzz guitar and distant and chiming vocals, before slowing down and going metal guitar, then starting up again. Then it goes metal again, only bigger, louder, until the vocals come back and so on. From anybody else, the song would qualify as strange. From Tall Dwarfs, it just sounds right. “Sleet” is all bass and sounds like the opening of a great Motown song until Knox comes in over the bass and sings a pretty little ditty with Beach Boy echoes about the rain, while what sounds to me like a badly tuned guitar makes its presence known.
It’s a weird little thing, reminds me of the unfairly obscure Brother JT it does, and it’s sweet and wrong in all the right ways as is “Carpetgrabber,” which opens with Knox singing “And the sky grows grey/It’s the end of days.” What it sounds like to me is a mutant second cousin of the 1967 classic “The Beat Goes On,” or to be more precise, a take-off of the Sonny & Cher song. Knox’s repeated “And the world goes round” is definitely reminiscent of “and the beat goes on,” and the off-kilter keyboards and bizarro percussion give it mucho weirdness appeal.
On opener “The Hills Are Alive,” Tall Dwarfs indulge in their penchant for making things difficult for the listener by opening the song with what sounds like a person with special needs talking about the horror movie classic The Hills Have Eyes. Then this fractured storm of strummed electric guitars comes in playing this deliriously lovely melody, only to be joined by a synthesizer and what sounds to me like a heavenly choir of rabid chipmunks. It’s simply delightful. “Clover (Take 1)” is a roughhewn chunk of acoustica on which Knox, agitated, sings lysergically about how he needs relaxation while somebody else joins in going “aaaaah-uh,” and it’s all quite primitive but neat.
The up-tempo but not in a punk way “Pretty Poison” is all fuzzed-out electric guitar power chords and amateurishly hammered piano, over which Knox sings out loud and sings out strong. It’s primitivism at its best, and hiding beneath it all, there’s a sweet melody that’s easy to miss, with Knox screaming hoarsely, “And stay with yoooooouuu!” “Woman,” which was recorded live (and you can tell), is a slow-to-start Lennon parody (there’s lots of John Boy echoes on the vocals) which a wag in the crowd points out by saying, “Hi, it’s John Lennon here.” It’s a real drag of a number, a veritable crawl, and all harsh electric guitar and Knox singing “What does it mean?/Don’t ask me/Ask her/Cuz she’s the one/She’s the one, etc.” It’s too droning hypnotic to be a room-clearer, and as the song goes on, Knox gets more confrontational and the electric guitar goes berserk, and what do you think Knox means when he ends “Woman” with the words, “She’s a woman/Only thing is now that it’s/OUR turn”? I’m assuming it’s an anti-feminist joke.
Which leaves us with the very photogenic, pretty “Burning Blue,” on which the guy from “The Hills Are Alive” makes a brief comeback before the boys launch into a heavy strummer with smoothed-out vocals that bring Arcade Fire to mind, along with some cute plinking noises. The boys go out whistling.
Fans of the Anglophilic and surf-music-loving disc jockeys of the Crab Nebula and your remoter radio galaxies, Tall Dwarfs transcribe what they hear, and the result is music that is always unique but somehow familiar, like you’ve been hearing it all your life in some obscure part of your brain you have no access to. Call it the Universal Brain, where everything that is and ever was resides. It’s there that Tall Dwarfs find their music. You’ve heard it before, you’ve been hearing it all your life, but you won’t know you’ve been hearing it until you listen to Tall Dwarfs.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
