Tall Dwarfs — Unravelled: 1981–2002
Qobuz new release review (August 2022)
Tall Dwarfs were one of the most important bands in New Zealand’s indie-rock boom of the ’80s and ’90s, and are absolutely — right alongside The Chills and The Clean — part of that scene’s royalty. (As a measure of their importance, it should be known that the band’s master recordings reside not in a record label’s vault, but in New Zealand’s National Library.) However, even when compared to the somewhat scattershot availability of other New Zealand indie rockers’ music, the albums and singles that Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate made as Tall Dwarfs have been frustratingly unable to find widespread release and distribution. While some of the duo’s late ’80s work made its way to the United States via Homestead Records in time to influence the likes of Neutral Milk Hotel and other Elephant 6 collectivists, nearly all of their ’90s output was distributed only in New Zealand and Australia. Thankfully for those of us outside the Antipodes, this massive-but-manageable 55-track collection from Merge Records compiled by Bathgate serves as both an excellent introduction for new fans and a solid go-to overview for longtime aficionados. Although nothing here is previously unreleased, the (mostly) chronologically track sequencing still provides plenty of revelations. For instance, the lo-fi-but-expansive dynamics of cuts like “Sign the Dotted Line” (1990) and “Crush” (1984) sound remarkably similar in tone and texture though recorded six years apart. (Even weirder, they both sound like a blueprint for an imaginary third Neutral Milk Hotel album, but were, of course, released well before that band’s debut, On Avery Island.) And that’s not taking into account Tall Dwarfs’ forays into burly, distorted power-pop (1998’s “The Fatal Flaw of the New”), gently gut-wrenching micro ballads (the 90-second-long “Two Minds” from 1996), or Portastudio psychedelia (1987’s “Dog”). Even when Tall Dwarfs are engaging in prototypical lo-fi indie fare — the simple weirdness of “Walking Home” (1983) and “The Green, Green Grass of Someone Else’s Home” (1996) or warbly acoustic numbers like “Road and Hedgehog” (1986) — they’re working on an entirely different plane from any of their supposed peers. While it’s definitely a shame that it took this long for this work to get the wide release it deserves, now that it’s available, there’s no excuse to not dig in.
