For the first six minutes of their first new record in four years, Omaha indie poppers Tilly and the Wall come out swinging. The muscular, calisthenic pair of songs that opens Heavy Mood announce loud and clear that it intends to be a departure. "We won't be quiet! We're gonna get wild!" Kianna Alarid roars on the insistent surf-guitar driven "Love Riot", which has the odd, rhythmic menace of a dance-fight, while the manic "Heavy Mood" sounds like the soundtrack to a packed capoeira class. "We've got to try-try-try-try-try to lift up the weight!" Derek Pressnall commands, punctuating ever lyric with a bellowing "HUH!" Every line is a manifesto. From the start, this is a record making its life-affirming demands with all the subtlety of a bold-italic-underlined thesis statement: you gotta fight for your right to love, live, and above all else DANCE!
But anyone who's listened closely to Tilly and the Wall can see the threads to their earlier work. Fey as they may appear, they've always had a little fight in them. Tilly's strongest albums, Wild Like Children and Bottoms of Barrels (both released on Conor Oberst's Team Love label), had a forever-young spirit that never shied away from sadness, sex, and the glories of insatiable inebriation. "Forty ounces is never enough, we wanna pass out in your yard," went Children's teen-delinquency anthem "Nights of the Living Dead", before exploding, into a proto-Kill-People-Burn-Shit-Fuck-School group chant: "I wanna fuck it up! I wanna fuck it up!" Like a glittery, tap-dancing unicorn, Tilly and the Wall have spent the better part of a decade giving meaning to the phrase "twee as fuck."
What should such a band sound like once its members get married and have kids? It's a question others have pondered before, but Heavy Mood stumbles in its attempt to offer innovative solutions. One highlight is the Alarid-led "Youth", which spins the track's slow tempo into a philosophy, "Living for speed and dying young, it's all been done before." Maybe so, but the best moments of Heavy Mood are also its most aerobic; the dull ballads "I Believe in You", "Echo My Love", and "Hey Rainbow" all bleed into each other, sputtering repetitively in their final minutes rather than building to the cathartic, schmaltz-transcendent climaxes of Barrels' "Coughing Colors" and "The Freest Man". The only trick the closing track "Defenders" has up its sleeve is a children's choir brought on to holler along with the band, "We're not afraid to live! No we're not afraid to die!" as the album fades out. Hate to say it's all been done before.
Somewhat ironically, given its professed devotion to creativity and liberation, Heavy Mood's best songs are the ones that offer fresh takes on familiar sounds. Aside from the opening lightning bolt that is "Love Riot", the girl-group-inspired "All Kinds of Guns" boasts the record's catchiest hook and punchiest lyrics ("My baby's got all kinds of guns, and he sticks to every one"). As do a few other of the more combative songs on Heavy Mood, "Guns" calls to mind tUnE-yArDs' incisive 2011 song "Riotriot" and Merrill Garbus's mid-song cry, "There is a freedom in violence that I don't understand and like I've never felt before!" "All Kinds of Guns" uses a winking play on words to suggest something larger about the fine line between passion and violence, and it’s an engaging articulation of the record's fighting spirit.
But though Heavy Mood's dedication to freedom, love, and liberation is admirable in the abstract, many recent records have tangled with these concepts with more originality and flair. Last year alone, tUnE-yArDs' exhilarating w h o k i l l explored many of Heavy Mood's themes with more specificity and bite, and the now-defunct Baltimore band Ponytail made a great record called Do Whatever You Want All the Time, with freewheeling music that actually made good on that credo. Compared to these records-- and earlier Tilly and the Wall releases-- what feels missing from Heavy Mood is specificity: Where are the characters, and what became of those kids passed out on the lawn? The heart of Heavy Mood is lost its in own sloganeering.
