Kleenex/LiLiPUT
LiLiPUT  (Kill Rock Stars)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002

One of my dirty little secrets about reviewing records is my reliance on outside information. While I often try to avoid other reviews, lest I find myself being influenced by (or, God help me, referencing) someone else’s opinions, I nonetheless like a little context before I process an album. But Kill Rock Stars, in their infinite wisdom, didn’t bother with any of that for LiLiPUT . They sent Space City Rock two CDs in individual slipcovers and nothing more: no jewel box, no tray insert and no liner notes (they did, to be fair, provide a three-page press kit). And so I’m stuck: I have to review the complete works of LiLiPUT with absolutely nothing to go on except the music itself.

Faced with the purest of reviewing tasks, I did what any self-respecting writer would do: I cheated, retreating to the (short) essays on the band by Robert Christgau (in Grown Up All Wrong) and Griel Marcus (in In The Fascist Bathroom), the latter of whom provided, along with guitarist Marlene Marder, the liner notes to which I can’t refer. I’m not sure I had much of a choice, though, since LiLiPUT is being presented not as music so much as a historical document of the initial flush of postpunk whammy. In other words, there is a very real and somewhat sinister way in which the music on LiLiPUT is made irrelevant by the mere fact of its having existed in the first place.

Which, until now, it may as well not have. LiLiPUT is, when you get right down to it, a rerelease of a rerelease, the U.S. debut of a compilation put out in Switzerland ten years ago, a decade after the initial unnoticed recordings tapered off. In essence, LiLiPUT was wiped from the history books and barely a soul blinked. Why is that? I figure that nobody knew what to do with them when they were around. One of the contingent of bohemian artistes (rather than thugs) who were attracted to the creative liberties laid bare by punk, Kleenex (the band’s pre-lawsuit moniker) fell in with the glorious noise that was suddenly, obviously possible. They then proceeded to collapse what few rules were left standing, thus paving the way for postpunk. If the Clash did away with articulation, the band that eventually became LiLiPUT did away with active meaning altogether, instead choosing their English lyrics on the basis of euphony. If this tactic would be picked up on a decade later by bands like Guided By Voices, LiLiPUT took it further by applying it at the syllabic level. The titles of their songs are often merely sing-song repetition (“Beri-Beri,” “Dolly Dollar” and “Ring-a-ding-dong”) or complete nonsense (“Umamm,” “Tshik-mo” and, yes indeed, “Ü”).

As a general rule, then, the lyrics defy criticism; sometimes even the nonsense becomes too constricting and the band resort to the first noises they can muster, from the siren-like “woo woo woo woo” in “Split” to the grunts and animal calls of “Outburst” to the now incredibly politically incorrect Indian calls that seem for a while like they’re going to be the only vocals in “Dolly Dollar” (the referee’s whistle in “Hitch-Hike” and the pinched saxophone squeals in “Igel” differ from the above only in cramming a device between the mouth and the microphone). The band’s early sides, which were more or less in line with the low-fi punk of the day, took relatively sparse advantage of that adventurousness, which eventually seeped into the instrumental foundation of the songs and began taking center stage as LiLiPUT evolved and added a “post-” to their punk. Most of the band’s later material, beginning with the start of disc two, seems to be without movement and dynamics in the traditional sense. Instead, as in the prototypical “Ü,” they hit a groove of sorts and then set it on indefinite repeat, embellishing it without altering the chord progression or whatever riff the guitar happens to be playing (“Ring-a-ding-dong” carries this to the extreme, based as it is around the same guitar figure as “The Jatz” two songs prior). LiLiPUT tends, especially in those later tracks, to be fairly rhythm-heavy; many songs are carried by bass and drums, with guitar and the occasional saxophone adding noises but not really taking on any standard harmonic role. “Tong Tong” is the logical conclusion of this pursuit, with a title that is simultaneously the only words and the only sounds that any of its instruments make.

Intriguing ideas, to be sure, but with few exceptions, including the typhonic “Eiseger Wind” and the backwards-beat “DC-10,” there isn’t much that seems to stick beyond its allotted duration. For those not attuned to what LiLiPUT are up to, cramming everything together in one place makes for one long wash with little differentiation between tracks in a way that, say, the Buzzcocks never suffered in the half-as-long-again Product . On the other hand, there’s no denying that LiLiPUT developed their own aesthetic, boldly staking their claim on the postpunk landscape in the hopes that others would choose to set up camp under their flag. Neither a rock-critic hoax nor the apotheosis of punk rock, LiLiPUT appears in the final analysis to be a band that had their moment but never capitalized on it and who were never quite as important as they should have been. Unless they were. If that’s the case, LiLiPUT isn’t the band’s legacy but its gravestone.

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