Customer Reviews

Fifty Flavours of Glue

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I was just doing some errands, driving around, listening to this piece of musical brilliance on my car's CD player, and it proved to be the perfect music for driving around in the northernmost suburbs of New York City on a cold, blustery early April day. I found myself fantasizing about being on the beach in New Zealand, watching dolphins swimming in the water, as the music of the Tall Dwarves fills the air. The music, eccentric and wonderful, was perfect for driving around on a day in which the sky kept shifting from sunny to silvery and snow producing.

Anyway, on to the music. What you get here is an intriguing mix of pastoral folk rock, John Cale-sounding chamber pop, delta blues, punk, noise, and psychedelic, with splashes of mid 60s era Kinks and Beatles as well as outright bizarro moments. It's all mixed together, and the end results are great. Musicians Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate take a kind of mad scientist approach, and experiment their way through the recording. As a result, the music here is wonderful, original, and totally unforgetable, and perfect for driving around or for lying on the sofa, contemplating the swimming of dolphins or of some other whimsical imagery. The Tall Dwarves may be a cult band (at least outside of their native New Zealand) but they are a genius cult band at that. Anything of theirs is worth many a listen.

Begins with a song about bodily crust followed by a hauntingly subdued ditty about clerical pedophilia. The usual range of topics on a Tall Dwarfs album, and showing the usual eclectic sounds. I could do without the kazoos and the countryish novelty tune, but the record gains density around its halfway point with a thicker neo-psychedelic topping that thickens the depths of this record appealingly. At times, even a goth-Joy Division mood permeates the largely late-Beatlesque/Lennon solo approach that Chris Knox favors. Not the place for beginners to start--try the re-releases of "Weeville" and "Fork Songs" first, but if you like Chris & Alec, then this will not disappoint.

Apart from the introduction of 'Doc' the drum machine Fifty Flavours isn't really a radical departure from any of of TD's previous albums.
A definite improvement over Stumpy, which i think was possibly their weakest album.
Fifty flavour contains all the wit, invention and craziness we've come to expect from Chris & Alec.

The Tall Dwarfs are in Tall form for this newest release. Coming on the heels of the slightly dissapointing "Stumpy," this is a welcome album that shows the boys in high form, blending the sounds of Wevill and some of the older albums. Of course, it's trite to compare it to older albums, as this stands clearly on it's own. Having heard Alec Bathgates solo release, I can sense that he had a stronger hand in creating some of these tunes, but Knox still dominates with his great vocal range. A worth while album for fans and newcomers alike. There are a wide variety of songs, from catchy pop tunes to bluesy melodies to low-fi adventures. Snatch it up!