Dateline—1979-ish, DUNEDIN, NZ. Punk is exploding amongst the children, so bored of sheep and Puritanism. It had made the ‘cross-oceans journey from England to Australia, hitched on an angler boat, and dropped off on shore; whence it rolled down the hills and around the valleys until, having accumulated unhealthy amounts of dirt, rocks, and dander, it collided with a splat with the side of the Knox family home in Invercargill. Siding was bent and cracked, pots and pans were rattled loose from their wall-hooks. The sink all but exploded. It was an unholy racket. Young Christopher hears this, and in his reefer-soaked, ennui-heavy state, hears beauty and rebellion. He starts a punk band, the first on the island, at his school and calls them The Enemy. The community murmurs, “Oh, what a trouble-maker, where are his parents?” But it is too late. Soon, the local children are skulking out at night in their newly-bartered-for leathers, to makeshift concerts in basements and barns, bloodying themselves on the barbed-wire of teen angst. Soon enough, there are many bands; some good, some horrible. There’s a local label—Flying Nun, pushing its wares out the back of a record store—which howls on to this day. There are secret societies, and lumpy, hirsute monsters in the forests grooving along. Soon, Mr. Knox joins up with guitarist Alec Bathgate bassist Paul Kean and forms Toy Love. How cute. They break up, and those first two start the Tall Dwarfs with nothing but some instruments, a four-track, and some crazy dreams.

I’m paraphrasing, of course. But before Hobbiton, what did you know about New Zealand? Yes, sheep, we mentioned that. No, Sydney is in Australia. I was referring to NZ pop and the Flying Nun crew, and without Knox and Bathgate, we wouldn’t have New Zealand to look at and go “How’s that again?” For those of you unfamiliar with the scene, NZ pop grew up seemingly in isolation, with little around to influence it (or fund it), so it grew into a strange little beast indeed, full of odd instrumentation and musical choices, and even odder lyrical imagery, much of which was garbled and unintelligible anyway. The earliest Dwarfs records show a free-wheeling spirit of heedless inspiration, like this one from 1983’s Slugbuckethairybreathmonster (which is a real creature in New Zealand, relative of the wombat). It’s all synths and drum machines, and there’s a lyric that’s all, “I can recall the place / Where I first met the human race / Tell me what I’ve missed / I gotta know.” No, it isn’t They Might Be Giants, and don’t ever talk to me that way again. They’re using the same component pieces, but instead of breezy Muzak, it’s all amp fuzz and clippity-clop drum machines and strange breaks. A tiny little guitar comes in, rocks for eight notes, then leaves, frightened. It’s one long what-the-fuck moment, as their best stuff often is, and there’s the strangest air of uncertain menace around, like a 5-year-old with an aluminum baseball bat.

And that, my friends, is charm. When they break out the multiple guitars and “rock,” it only gets worse. Here, they strum, closed-fisted, at basically random intervals, hitting whatever notes make the least sense at any given moment, but still throw off all the requisite sparks needed for us to hear a rock song. They spit out the kind of irrational genius that apparently only grows in out-of-the-way places where no one is around to say, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” Knox gives the game away when he intones, gravely, “We don’t know if what we see or hear is real ‘cuz no one can tell us.” Then he says you’re beautiful. Run. They stuck it out through the early ’90s (save a few shambolic “reunion” shows earlier this year), by which time they’d scored some international cred, a little bank, and something resembling a normal, human studio; and while their last album, 1994’s 3 Eps, contains some unabashed, normal-sounding beauty, with real notes and everything, next to the Dwarf-rockers, they didn’t so much get all trad as start hiding their monsters under the bed. For all intents and purposes, this is a conventionally very-pretty acoustic-guitar-and-piano-led ballad, but that lyric. Something about “frozen eyes… black and cold… either/or… of your brain?” And the noise that occasionally threatens to take over? Nope, still scary, now there’s just a false sense of security. You’re still not safe here. Don’t know why you thought you were.

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