DESCRIPTION:
Chris Knox has been a fixture of New Zealand's music scene since the '70s, when he rode the record industry's fast-track conveyor belt to exhaustion with Toy Love. In the '80s, his duo Tall Dwarfs helped show the way for the Kiwi names you know better to make records at home on their own terms; as a major player for Flying Nun Records, his irrepressible presence (or at least the loan of his 4-track) helped the Clean, the Chills, the Verlaines, and This Kind Of Punishment (amongst many others) to get their early efforts to wax. For almost as long he's been making solo records, which have mostly consisted of home-recorded songs with big buzzing guitar hooks, dumb-as-rocks drum loops, and unchecked rant against society's pressures to conform. But times change, and with them associations and methods; this is Knox's first effort on his own A Major Label, and it's also a fairly involved studio recording with an honest-to-goodness band with strings, horns, and Jol Mulholland on bass and Stefan Neville (a.k.a. Pumice) on drums.