"There once was a poet from Nantucket
Whose verse bounded into boudoirs draped adverbially in thorny camouflage ripped and woven from gnarly tufts of double meaning and thickets of unimaginably dense metaphor.
He said 'Rhyme, meter, sequence, and logic
are insensate, cruel, frequent, and stodgy.
Also, what’s the point of frozen pizza if it’s gonna cost $6.99? Hey, my pants are unzipped.'"

-- Brian Block, "A Limerick"


I bought the Tall Dwarfs' Hello Cruel World in 1990, my first year of music collecting, based only on the Trouser Press Music Guide's claim that it was full of clever ways to never ever use drums. I liked it. To listen to it now, and realize that, is something like it would be to rummage through my old 5th-grade papers and find a fond, carefully hand-printed book report on Thomas Pynchon's V.

It's not just that Hello remains on the dubious margins of my tastes even now. It's that I remember taking many many years to develop my tastes to where the margins would go that far, to where this first Tall Dwarfs album should even make sense to me as music. In 1990 my tastes centered around Rush's Presto, Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust, the Boomtown Rats' the Fine Art of Surfacing, edging over towards Sting's the Dream of the Blue Turtles: masterpieces all, I still think, but enforcing a very clear belief (which I didn't yet know was debatable enough to _be_ a belief) that production should be expensive and playing should be skillful. Hello Cruel World is among the cheapest, crappiest recordings I've ever heard; the only excuse I can see for not having found it revolutionary is that it tries, so desperately, to be too muffled to exhort.

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The arrangements -- recorded in New Zealand on EP's dated 1981-84, released to the world in 1988 on this full-length compilation -- tend to be clever but simple. "Song of the Silents", say, has the stark doominess of the early Cure if their guitarist and bassist had been terrified to lift their fingers off their strings, and their singer muttered in a secret club code while chewing gum. "Phil's Disease, Day 1" has decorative 12-string guitar over a percussion loop that toy soldiers could march to. "Maybe", quite pretty, peaks in intensity when the soft jangly guitar finds a 3rd and 4th chord to connect the main two. "Nothing's Gonna Happen" is standard 4-chord folk, except that the guitar chords aren't tuned, the wineglasses are, and Chris Knox seems to be making up the bridge on the spot. "Paul's Place" is what robot karaoke might be like, if we assume R2D2 and his garbage-can cousins are bleeping and clanging away over static prerecorded backgrounds of human voice.

At worst, songs like "Walking Home" and "Clover" disappear inside their own wispiness -- though to be fair, "Clover"'s bent chords and grumbled singing have a naive charm that a readily-imaginable Doors version wouldn't. Besides, you might argue that the worst songs are the ones you _can_ hear easily. "Luck or Loveliness"'s rhythm guitar does not perceive rhythm in any known earthling terms, which is nothing next to what is either one of the best, or worst, guitar solos in history. "Phil's Disease, Day 4" sounds like we can rule out a day 6; had Knox named the brand of clavinet (keyboard) he used, he would've risked a lawsuit from the manufacturer. "Turning Brown and Torn In Two" hides an elliptical acoustic guitar song around corners from the big huffing sewer monster who sets the rhythm.

Vocally, Chris Knox slurs or edges away from his words, though less so than the whispered please-don't-hit-me leads of his sole bandmate Alec Bathgate. Happily, Knox does bother to enunciate, twice, a lyric that later became my America On-Line profile quote (he sings it once with high-pitched nasal hesitancy, once in a howl nearer a yodel):

"Maybe all the children in small rooms
will fall silent at a wall or a window,
and forget to breathe for just one moment,
because of some beauty
that has not been altered, damned, or pointed out
by the clumsy dark oafs who train them".

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It may seem an odd ideal for me, since I’m pretty much a classic Pointer-Outer Oaf, but it’s actually those moments of found beauty that I hope to help inspire. I show you how I found the moments that made me forget to breathe for just one moment; Knox and Bathgate play you the unexpected half-tuned strums and trashcan lids that maybe gave them such moments. Now you go find your own.

This doesn’t mean I can tell you how exactly, in 1990, I managed to like Cruel World. The moronic catchiness of "Paul's Place" must have helped: it's become, for me, one of those 2-minute blasts of one-idea perfection that the New Wave generated so freely (see also the psychotic jumprope chanting of Liliput's "Split", the electric violin grind of the Raincoats' "In Love", or the one-chord rock'n'roll of Plastic Bertrand's "Ca Plane Pour Moi", all of which have small but well-deserved cult followings). But most of the credit probably goes to "the Brain That Wouldn't Die". Built on a cheap echoing synthesizer riff and a frivolously recorded set of backing "ooooh-wah"s, it's as obvious a sports-event replacement for "Mony Mony" or "We Will Rock You" as I've ever heard. Maybe that one link between the Tall Dwarfs’ universe and ours was enough for the rest of the matter to spill in.

Admittedly "Brain..."'s lyrics edge closer in spirit to "we won't rock you. Uh-oh?" But that's okay. Play for the sake of play is usually a losing stance. Which is maybe why my musical tastes were destined to stop hanging out all the time with winners.

Recommended: Yes