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By Salon critics
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chris knox
(+++++++++++[ - - - YES!! - - - ]+++FLYING NUN++)

For a tiny and sparsely populated country, New Zealand has an astonishingly fertile underground music scene, and it's fair to say that its central figure for the past 20 years has been Chris Knox. He inspired the scene more or less single-handedly with his first band the Enemy, went on to greater success with Toy Love, made some waves internationally with Tall Dwarfs (his 16-years-and-running experimental pop duo with Alec Bathgate) and has a high profile at home as a critic and cartoonist. For years, he recorded, played with or drew record covers for nearly every important Kiwi band. He's also made five awesomely catchy solo albums -- Marshall Crenshaw and Frente have covered his songs, and 1995's "Songs of You and Me" was a huge college-radio hit in America. He's also an inspired, often hilarious live performer.

So why haven't most people heard of him? Because he's -- how to put this? -- kind of a weirdo. Like his earlier solo records, "YES!!" was recorded at home, almost entirely by Knox alone (a pal drops by to play bagpipes on one song). He's got his own ideas about what constitutes a song -- some of these are fully realized, some are fragmentary at best ("Almost Tempted" is a five-minute Lou Reed parody with a two-line lyric, though it's a pretty great parody). He's also got his own ideas about what a pop record should sound like: The Knox formula is a snatch of melody repeated as many times as he can get away with it, a couple of fuzzed-up chords and a drum loop that sounds like a mud-wrestling match in a Christmas-tree-ornament factory. And he doesn't like to leave perfectly good space on a CD blank, so the last 20 minutes of "YES!!" are filled up by a rather pointless stab at musique concrete.

Get past his surface peculiarities, though (or, even better, learn to love them), and you'll find an extraordinary songwriter and performer. At this tormented and indecisive moment for rock outside the mainstream, Knox is all about enthusiasm. "YES!!" (and how's that for affirmation?) opens with "The Joy Of Sex," a bounding rocker that's basically an excuse for him to sing "babybabybabybabybabybabybaby" every 10 seconds for four minutes. But note that what he's about is enthusiasm, not cheeriness. The bounciest tune here is "Backstab Boogie," whose rapid-fire lyric includes lines like "Drop the shit -- I'll make it clear that every one of us is here for you/But I don't know if I can give a damn/It's helping little ego-freaks that got me where I am." And, though he's dropped the awkwardly polemic politics of earlier records, Knox bites down on "The Ballad of a Victim of the Economic Recovery" with the venom it deserves. A few tracks here are Knox-by-numbers: words that sound great and don't actually mean anything, set to a riff too long in its grave to be resuscitated. Even at his most rote, though, Knox is sui generis, and when he stretches himself out, his ecstatic pep is as catchy as his tunes. The album proper ends with "Flaky Pastry," a one-chord wonder that alternates a simple, sneering chorus with a hurtling tumble of double-time syllables --"surfing down a superhighway totaled out on tunnel-vision serving veggieburgers to the Ku Klux Klan." By midway through the song, Knox is audibly winded, but he's singing his heart out anyway. However strange it seems, it's exactly his idea of fun.
SALON | Oct. 8, 1997