On wide-ruled loose-leaf with cursive signatures and loopy flowers doodled in the margins, it sounded awful. Conor Oberst founded the unfortunately titled Team Love, an imprint whose flagship band was Tilly and the Wall, an Omaha indie pop group that featured members of Oberst's lapsed teen-pop band Park Ave. and a tap-dancer instead of a drummer. Those of us who like our indie pop with a dash of sophistication couldn't be blamed for rolling our eyes at the extravagant whimsy of it all. And when Wild Like Children arrived, its paeans to teenage urgency were packed with every expected measure of fanciful sincerity, but its exuberance and sound musicianship rendered its potentially grating aspects charming, transcending mawkish nostalgia and engendering real pathos. In Tilly's world, "raucous" wasn't a sneaky shorthand for "sloppy," and "childlike" wasn't a euphemism for "stupid"-- Tilly addressed the frissons of youth with the nuance and precision of adult hindsight.
Paradoxical as it sounds, Bottoms of Barrels is an even more mature take on immaturity. The songs are infectious, usually visceral, booming with bright, big-hearted melodies and densely speckled with tap-dancer Jamie Williams' clattering cascades. Multiple songs make express mention of the very act they inspire-- the wanton stomping of feet. Two in particular comprise the most memorable music to emerge from Omaha in recent memory. "Rainbows in the Dark" has a woozy melody that billows over a crisp rhythm. Neely Jenkins's mobile vocals cover every available inch of space, surging and subsiding through deft register shifts. The music's energetic crackle is matched by its lyrics, where a dizzying torrent of images reels like a runaway carousel-- fights break out; the neighborhood boys buzz with joy; a punk record shoots stars; a city spins light; and it's all bound together by "the stitching of beautiful seams." And "Bad Education", with its lithe gypsy swagger, finds Jenkins's voice sawing like a fiddle, ticking off a digest of calamitous escape, tugging at seatbelts, leaping from saddles, kneeling at steeples. The whole record bristles with energy, but the sheer chutzpah of these two songs is difficult to overstate.
Tilly's at their best when Jenkins and Derek Pressnall are trading lines like mash notes; the songs where Pressnall takes the lead tend to be more maudlin and less lively, pretty but soft-focused without Jenkins's ragged edge. The gentle acoustic lilt of "Love Song" is typical post-Bright-Eyes sensitive boy fare: "As we removed each others clothes/ I thought I would sing some notes/ So that maybe you would slow dance with me." And "Coughing Colors" is a slow-building, harmony-bathed piano ballad of almost satiric tenderness. These numbers are a bit syrupy, but actually strike a nice contrast to the greater part of the album's hectic gallop, and Pressnall lodges a more vigorous vocal performance on the incantatory "Sing Songs Along". Kianna Alarid, the group's third vocalist, takes on the occasional torch song as well, most notably the lovely lament "Lost Girls".
Tilly and the Wall's music is childlike in the sense that it celebrates the tactile and emotional world with the verve of unjaded perception; organs of pure sense probe the enticing recesses of the night. Their music is a prism that refracts the wonder of the human pageant from various angles, making familiar colors bend fantastically. It doesn't deny harsh realties-- Tilly's world of teenage knife fights and drunken bra-clasp fumblings doesn't elide homeless women walking the snow; a prostitute with "money spilling out of her hands;" "the newly born crying, realizing what life is" or a grandfather's weathered eyes. Tilly blurs them all into a giddy compendium of humanity, at once acknowledging and renouncing the possibility of despair: "The world is big and it's got a loose heart/ So you either start screaming or start singing."
