Tilly & The Wall's full-length debut of study-hall pop, Wild Like Children, is the first release on Conor Oberst's brand new record label, Team Love. Which, I'm sorry; but calling a label that curates earnest and emotionally naked pop music "Team Love" is kind of like giving birth to a chubby kid and naming it "Lardo." It ain't gonna to help their chances on the playground any, if you get my drift.
But in an era of stymied passion and cynical detachment, when many bands hide their emo urges under a bushel of aggressive guitar and abstruse non sequitur, Oberst's baldly maudlin sentimentality seems almost punk by comparison, as it unapologetically violates accepted mores of good taste. Is suburban mawkishness the new radicalism? The avant to the slickly cosmopolitan garde of Interpol, TV on the Radio, The Stills and The Strokes? The American mystery deepens by degrees.
In addition to gelling with Oberst's unabashed my-angst-is-bigger-than-your-angst aesthetic, Team Love makes literal sense: Tilly & The Wall is a chance for old friends to get together and relive their halcyon days of teenage romance, early adventures with booze and heavy-petting, and starry, night-stalking urgency. Consequently, affection, tenderness and shared history ooze from the record's seams like homely yet structurally indispensable grout.
Tilly & The Wall's roots lie in a band called Park Ave., which was one of the always-prolific Oberst's pre-Bright Eyes efforts. Park Ave. played saccharine, pointedly amateurish, yet relentlessly infectious sing-along pop, with a "My locker is stuck again!" lyrical purview that made sense, considering that its authors were actually living through such amplified teenage crises at the time, rather than exploiting them for forced pathos (cough Dashboard Confessional cough). Park Ave. also included Tilly & The Wall's Jaime Williams and Neely Jenkins, and their output, while just a hair above the Langley Schools Music Project in terms of musicianship, was ridiculously infectious, and revealed a songwriting acuity that was drastically disproportionate to its members' nominal experience.
As such, those of you familiar with Park Ave. are already tacitly familiar with Tilly & The Wall-- they sound, essentially, like a grown-up Park Ave., with tighter arrangements, more focused songwriting, glossier production and a tap-dancing percussionist. I'll pause for a moment while you internalize that last bit.
It's true. Most songs on Wild Like Children can be summed up as [band X] with a tap-dancer: Belle & Sebastian with a tap-dancer; Son, Ambulance with a tap-dancer; Rilo Kiley with a tap-dancer; Bright Eyes with a tap-dancer; and, on certain rollicking piano-driven numbers, Billy Joel... with a tap-dancer. This similitude is neither surprising nor a slight to the band; pop music is more about familiarity and heritage than novelty. Wheels that spin on the well-oiled bearings of eternally enticing melodies don't require reinvention; leave that to the deconstructionists, academics and post-music provocateurs.
Brimming with co-ed harmonies, jangly acoustic guitars and lambent keyboards, Tilly & The Wall forgo a drummer and allow Jaime Williams' tap-dancing to provide the rhythmic chassis. While this may sound like a despicable throwaway gimmick upon first impression, it actually makes a great deal of intuitive sense, and seems so completely natural that one becomes kind of astonished that the tap-dancer-as-percussionist isn't more common. Williams hoofs out striated, staccato clusters that would be impossible to replicate on drums, and lends the clattering pop songs a crisp and martial demeanor that buoys them up above the traditional indie-pop maneuvers they otherwise employ.
Of course, indie pop has always gotten by on swooning melodies, and without them the conceit would fall flat, but Tilly & The Wall rise to the occasion with a collection of thoroughly hummable nursery rhyme airs. Wild Like Children opens with "Fell Down the Stairs", which is consummately Park Ave., with its prolix male/female narrative of teenage trepidation ("They got lost as they were taking off each others' clothes"), galloping acoustic guitar, tinkling bells and theatrical a cappella breakdown. "Nights of the Living Dead" puts David Dondero doppelganger Derek Pressnall's vocals front-and-center for a quickening ode to the possibilities of a closed-down nighttime world, borne along on a tide of staticky, surging guitar, with sudden exclamations leaping from the darkly glittering current like fantastic fish. The wistful, gently unfolding ballad "Let It Rain" would have nestled snugly on the Son, Ambulance/Bright Eyes split release Oh Holy Fools, with a transparent lyrical simplicity that echoes its spare arrangement: "I thought you'd come and go/ I never thought you would stay/ And I'm sorry if I tried to push you away."
In the final, unlisted track on Jawbreaker's Dear You, Blake Schwarzenbach broadcast this petition into the skeptical, dead-eyed cosmos: "Show me the raw stuff of youth." Nearly a decade later, Tilly & The Wall have answered with an album that harnesses this fiery anima with the highest imaginable fidelity. It's remarkable how little signal degradation has occurred, considering that the band members are professional-class citizens (two of them retired from public school teaching to devote more time to Tilly) in their mid-twenties. Often, grown folk singing about teenaged problems comes across as exploitative and off-putting (cough Papa Roach cough-- sorry, I must be coming down with something). But Tilly & The Wall split their time so equally between youth's heartaches and unmatchable joys that it seems a heartfelt and sophisticated coming-of-age document, despite the fact that "sophisticated" is usually antithetical to such ingenuous musical roman a clef.
