Part II: What I Actually Wrote
At some point during the night, I don't remember exactly when--well, no, it was a thrid of the way through Tilly and the Wall's set--my blogging plan changed from compare mode to contrast.
I'll start with the opening act. The guitarist is the regular opening act for Tilly. After a mid tempo opening song, he started the intro of his second song with "Do you know the artist Mark Rothko? He made a lot of paintings that are just large black canvases that you are just supposed to stare into the blackness. i felt this perfectly discribed the heart of a girl I once knew." He then described the Rothko Chapel, which is also the title of the song. Argh. I left the TV at the back of the club in the 9th inning of the College Baseball World Series for this? He introduced a later song with something about how he was at a party full of English majors when he said that he was thinking about committing suicide. They stopped him by complaining about how trite suicide was. I think it was after this that some guy near me who was obviously there for DeVotchKa yelled out "Bright Eyes has entered the room." That guy got a couple of angry looks from some Tilly fans--they hail from Omaha and are on Conor Oberst's label.
Now, I'll skip ahead to Tilly. I must preface this review with the fact that I did kinda like the songs that I heard from their website, the more the show went along, the less I enjoyed them. There were some mitigating circumstances at work here. First, two of them were sick. After the first song, a couple of fans gave them two cartons of orange juice because they had heard they were sick. (They had lots of fans who knew all their lyrics. Mostly female college sophomores, it seemed.) To make matters worse, this display of affection came during the ten minute break after the first song. For some reason, the mics on the tap dancer were just not working, and while they tried to fix them, the mic of the singer who was talking to fill time died. It had to be replaced. Then the mic for the other singer died and had to be replaced. I have never seen anything like that. They never really got the problem with the tap dancer mics fixed, and I'm pretty sure this caused them to not do a couple of songs. I have to think I saw what was by far the worst show on their tour.
That said, I started out with the feeling that they were good, but not great. However, as it went a long, I began to like them even less. It wasn't so much their music, it was more their stage presence, especially the singer who occasionally played bass. She did most of the between song banter, and the word "poseur" came to mind every time. If you don't love us with all your heart and soul, there is clearly something wrong with you, they seem to tell me. They had the feeling of the "cool people" on a TV high school drama that centers on the outcasts who are the actual cool ones.
There is of course on more very large mitigating circumstance--For this show only, they had to follow not the solo guitar player but DeVotchKa. I mean, with them on one song, you've got drums, violin, sousaphone, and frontman Nick Urata using the neck of his bouzouki to excite his theremin. Then on the next song the violin player switches to accordion, the sousaphonist to a bowed upright bass, and the drummer pulls out his trumptet. Plus, they play in 3:4 and 2:4 time signatures with dramatic changes in tempo. The sound of Tilly and the Wall is this light pop ephemera with one accoustic rhythm guitar, a guy playing keyboards, three people singing most of the time, and a tap dancer, whereas DeVotchKa feel like the resistance fighters who barely had time to grab their accordion and sousaphone before catching the last boat to Casablanca. They have such a strong connection to the earth, but they ache because it's been taken away. They rock, but they still get upset when you use the word gyspy to discribe their Roma influences in their cover of "Venus in Furs." Tilly and the Wall didn't really stand a chance.
There was another telling contrast. Most of the members of Tilly had a bottle of beer on stage with them, but the keyboardist didn't. At one point he said that was really thirsty and hoped that someone in the audience would buy him a beer. He'd pay them back, of course. In perfect contrast, the lead singer of DeVotchKa came on stage with a bottle of wine. On a couple of occassions, he briefly held it above his bowed head soluting us before taking a swig without saying a word. It was very much cool adults vs. kids who think they're cool.
I'll start with the opening act. The guitarist is the regular opening act for Tilly. After a mid tempo opening song, he started the intro of his second song with "Do you know the artist Mark Rothko? He made a lot of paintings that are just large black canvases that you are just supposed to stare into the blackness. i felt this perfectly discribed the heart of a girl I once knew." He then described the Rothko Chapel, which is also the title of the song. Argh. I left the TV at the back of the club in the 9th inning of the College Baseball World Series for this? He introduced a later song with something about how he was at a party full of English majors when he said that he was thinking about committing suicide. They stopped him by complaining about how trite suicide was. I think it was after this that some guy near me who was obviously there for DeVotchKa yelled out "Bright Eyes has entered the room." That guy got a couple of angry looks from some Tilly fans--they hail from Omaha and are on Conor Oberst's label.
Now, I'll skip ahead to Tilly. I must preface this review with the fact that I did kinda like the songs that I heard from their website, the more the show went along, the less I enjoyed them. There were some mitigating circumstances at work here. First, two of them were sick. After the first song, a couple of fans gave them two cartons of orange juice because they had heard they were sick. (They had lots of fans who knew all their lyrics. Mostly female college sophomores, it seemed.) To make matters worse, this display of affection came during the ten minute break after the first song. For some reason, the mics on the tap dancer were just not working, and while they tried to fix them, the mic of the singer who was talking to fill time died. It had to be replaced. Then the mic for the other singer died and had to be replaced. I have never seen anything like that. They never really got the problem with the tap dancer mics fixed, and I'm pretty sure this caused them to not do a couple of songs. I have to think I saw what was by far the worst show on their tour.
That said, I started out with the feeling that they were good, but not great. However, as it went a long, I began to like them even less. It wasn't so much their music, it was more their stage presence, especially the singer who occasionally played bass. She did most of the between song banter, and the word "poseur" came to mind every time. If you don't love us with all your heart and soul, there is clearly something wrong with you, they seem to tell me. They had the feeling of the "cool people" on a TV high school drama that centers on the outcasts who are the actual cool ones.
There is of course on more very large mitigating circumstance--For this show only, they had to follow not the solo guitar player but DeVotchKa. I mean, with them on one song, you've got drums, violin, sousaphone, and frontman Nick Urata using the neck of his bouzouki to excite his theremin. Then on the next song the violin player switches to accordion, the sousaphonist to a bowed upright bass, and the drummer pulls out his trumptet. Plus, they play in 3:4 and 2:4 time signatures with dramatic changes in tempo. The sound of Tilly and the Wall is this light pop ephemera with one accoustic rhythm guitar, a guy playing keyboards, three people singing most of the time, and a tap dancer, whereas DeVotchKa feel like the resistance fighters who barely had time to grab their accordion and sousaphone before catching the last boat to Casablanca. They have such a strong connection to the earth, but they ache because it's been taken away. They rock, but they still get upset when you use the word gyspy to discribe their Roma influences in their cover of "Venus in Furs." Tilly and the Wall didn't really stand a chance.
There was another telling contrast. Most of the members of Tilly had a bottle of beer on stage with them, but the keyboardist didn't. At one point he said that was really thirsty and hoped that someone in the audience would buy him a beer. He'd pay them back, of course. In perfect contrast, the lead singer of DeVotchKa came on stage with a bottle of wine. On a couple of occassions, he briefly held it above his bowed head soluting us before taking a swig without saying a word. It was very much cool adults vs. kids who think they're cool.
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