"Why don't you listen to LiLiPUT/ Where punk rock starts and ends?" asked a Yummy Fur song in the mid-1990s. "Maybe if you listened to LiLiPUT/ Your songs would find more friends." The Swiss band that called itself first Kleenex, then LiLiPUT, formed in 1978, went through a succession of lineups and three singers, produced a handful of singles and two albums, broke up in 1983, and released a 2xCD of all its extant studio recordings more than a decade later. That collection, called simply LiLiPUT, is a singular post-punk document-- a band inspired by the punk revolution but doing something radically different. You can hear them inventing an idiom from scratch, writing songs that used their rudimentary skills brilliantly, then building on their initial momentum to push themselves further out. It's unlike anything that came before it, and a total blast to listen to. (There may never have been a giddier song recorded than "Split".)
Any further recordings, you'd think, would be precious; I've bought more than a couple of dodgy records by other bands because somebody compared them to this one. (A word of advice to anyone thinking of buying, say, the Nixe reissue that came out in 2008: It turns out that being European women who started a band in the post-punk era and didn't have a lot of technical facility at first was not, in fact, what made LiLiPUT special.) So this new 2xCD release sounded mighty promising: a Kleenex set from 1979 and a LiLiPUT set from 1983, plus five previously unreleased songs, and a DVD with half a dozen video clips and Roadmovie, a film of their 1982 tour.
Unfortunately, from the evidence of Live Recordings, LiLiPUT weren't a particularly great live band, and Kleenex were terrible-- shaky, often way out of tune, clinging as tightly as they could to the contours of their recordings and occasionally not even able to manage that. (Somebody bobbles the ending of "Ain't You".) The unheard songs are lesser variations on other things they were doing at the time. Roadmovie turns out to be silent, hand-held Super-8 footage of whatever caught the camera-holder's eye on the road, scored with recordings from LiLiPUT's albums; if you've ever wanted to see blurry images of the Swiss autobahn circa 1982, this may hold a smidgen of interest for you.
The video clips are a bit more interesting, especially the 1979 TV appearance in which they wear color-coded outfits and awesome new wave hairstyles, and bassist Klaudia Schiff uncertainly mugs for the camera. But the bottom line is that someone coming to this album without having heard Kleenex/LiLiPUT's studio recordings would have very little idea why one of the greatest bands of their era was anything special. Passionate fans of LiLiPUT still long for anything more that lives up to their legacy. We're going to have to keep waiting.
