Tilly and the Wall

from Team Love: O is Tilly and the Wall’s most cohesive, sonically experimental album yet. In addition to building a tack piano for certain songs, the band toyed with percussion much more than their previous efforts, recording Jamie’s taps through a variety of different amplifiers and floors to give each song its own distinct rhythm. Opener “Tall Tall Grass” is classic Tilly – strummed acoustic guitar, Neely and Kianna’s harmonies and a tale detailing a love lost to the seasons. It is followed by a ten-person stomp troop recorded in an Omaha school gym marching out the beat to “Pot Kettle Black,” a cymbal-smashing, hand-clapping ode to shit-talking, which immediately tumbles into “Cacophony,” with its three-part harmonic layers and rambling horns, and “I Found You,” a call and response Odyssey of sorts whose narrator is always searching and always walking through one season to the next. “Jumbler,” featuring an all-girl tap trio and percussive pots and pans, is carried by a 50’s-esque piano part, while “Chandelier Lake,” the album’s centerpiece, is dreamy, fuzz-laced, and filled with broken organs, detailing a place where the water meets the land and life comes together in a mysterious way. The track is one of many on O whose narrative details the mixing of the personal and the organic world – songs frequently feature grass, flowers, blood, trees, snow, water, dust, sand, trash, electricity and gardens, all tied up with loss, love, need and exploration. The record closes with “Too Excited,” a stomper of a song packed with group vocals and “yeeeeah!” choruses. With its massive dose of high energy, hip-shaking attitude, it’s the sort of song that reminds you why you fell for Tilly and the Wall in the first place. And if you’re like us, you’ll quickly hit the “play” button to begin the journey that is O all over again…