Happy Feet (I Don’t Think We’re in Omaha, Anymore, Pt 1)

Okay, with the tap dancing rock group, already.  But like all good trips, we have to take the scenic route. 

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard Bright Eyes.  I came to the Omaha scene late, and in the least appropriate way possible:  Saw a blurb in Rolling Stone (NEVER reliable unless it’s David Fricke) that their CD was “the best indie release of the year” – again, meaningless, because it was Rolling Stone... but the title got me, and I’ve bought many a CD based on band name/title.  Then I saw Lifted, or The Story is in the Soil Keep Your Ear to the Ground while killing some time in a Best Buy – that’s right, Best Freakin’ Buy – and snatched it up.

So I got introduced to one of America’s strongest independent music scenes by way of corporate magazine suckage and big-box cookie-cutter storage.

But as the great Boris Lermontov always said, “Nothing matters but the music." 

* 

Lifted opens with a pair of kids getting into a car, starting the engine, popping a tape of Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst into their car stereo.  As he sings “The Big Picture,” they trade quips about being lost, and occasionally, sing along. 

So there I am, having popped the CD into my car stereo, mired in Route 9 traffic, swearing, screaming at my dashboard.  “No!  No way!  You are not that fucking good!”  I listened to that first track again, and again, and all the way home.  It took me maybe a solid week to get through the whole album.  The combination of Oberst’s earnest, poetically thick lyrics and the inventive backing (there’s what sounds like a drum corps in places, there’s a goddamn waltz) demands multiple listens, and I gave in to the demands.  For months I kept this in heavy rotation; when I wasn’t listening to it, I was insistently shoving it into other peoples’ hands and praying that they’d get it back to me soon.

Oberst – Bright Eyes is a collective based around him – is one of those terrifyingly competent wise-beyond-his-years twenty-somethings that seems poised to live the lie that our parents promised us:  He could actually be anything he wants to be.  There’s already so much lore based around the growth of the Omaha, Nebraska music scene, but he’s always at the center of it.  There’s Conor, writing songs and recording in his bedroom at age 14; there he is at the founding of local label Saddle_Creek, appearing in the bands Commander Venus and Park Ave.; there he is appearing on what seems like every Saddle Creek release, in some capacity.  There he is pouring his heart out on every Bright Eyes release, rocking his ass off with his side project The Desaparecidos .

Now, there he is onstage with Bruce Springsteen and R.E.M.

What is Omaha music?  It doesn’t have a unifying musical style – this isn’t Seattle alloveragain.  It’s intimate and honest stuff, which is why even the most folk-based releases get slapped with the “emo” label.  It’s a genuinely local musical outlet, its groups drawing on each other and other area musicians to an almost incestuous extent:  Both Oberst and the scene’s other dominant figure, Tim Kasher, have a pair of bands... and Kasher’s hardcore band Cursive recently stole its cellist (that’s right) from Bright Eyes, while Oberst sang about how much he liked the latest Cursive album on Lifted.  And frighteningly enough, it’s mostly all... good.  It’s like they suddenly struck oil, under all that corn.

So what happens when the scene floods past the Nebraskan border?

Well, Oberst has already slept with Winona Ryder, never a good thing.  He now splits his time between Omaha and the road and Brooklyn, and has started his own label.  Lifted came out more than two years ago, and the only Bright Eyes releases since then were a pair of split EPs on which Oberst came out on the short end.  The Desaparecidos have yet to release a second CD.  When I saw them at a sold-out show in Philadelphia more than a year ago the audience was already overly reverent, soundlessly mouthing lyrics to songs that hadn’t yet appeared on any album.

*

Which is only one of the reasons to embrace Tilly and the Wall.

The first band signed to Oberst’s Team Love label, their foundation is the remnants of one of his first bands, Park Ave.  Such loyalty would be commendable enough, but the music rocks.  Or taps.  The line-up is, y’know, your basic rock five-piece:  A guitarist, a keyboardist, a pair of female vocalists and a tap dancer.  

This screams “novelty act,” but damned if it doesn’t work.  Substituting tap shoes for a drum set, the sound is intimate and winning.  Lighter on its feet, if you will.

They opened an Omahacentric bill at the Bowery Ballroom Friday night, and the crowd loved them.  The line-up democratically lines up across the front of the stage, the rock band version of the knights of the round table, but all eyes were on Jamie Williams (the same Jamie from Park Ave.’s When Jamie Went to London...) as she flammed, shuffled, and even stomped out a Wall of Sound-type beat.  That’s what you’re watching, of course, but the songs that are strong enough to transcend any gimmickry (Sample some here.  My favorites are the hokey-pokey-quoting “Shake it Out” and the beautiful, fragile “I Always Knew”).

Their thirty-minute set was waaaay too short, but my face still hurt from smiling.  They ended with “Nights of the Living Dead,” leaving the stage after the crowd joined them in chanting both “I want to fuck it up!” and “I feel so alive,” twin phrases that seem to best sum up the full Tilly effect.

*

When a musical boom happens, britches burst, and the floodgates open; groups start pouring in to take advantage of the attention. 

Friday’s headliner, Los Angeles-formed Rilo Kiley even sang about this in the title track from their last CD, The Execution of All Things:  “Then we’ll go to Omaha, to work and exploit the booming music scene.”  Plan worked.  Their current CD, More Adventurous, is on a Warner Bros.-owned label... and they’re poised to get real big.

Adventurous makes the jump from the country-tinged indie-rock of Execution (on which, of course, Oberst cameo’d) straight over Pop and squarely into Adult Contemporary.  Not to say that it’s bad.  “Does He Love You?” deserves to be a Major Effin’ Hit, reeling off hourly on VH1 and humming out of every pair of lips that tried to wrap themselves around Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful.”  Singer Jenny Lewis’ voice deservedly dominates the album – she’s got some pipes – and the first half is filled with some really solid songs.  But it peters out quickly, whimpering to the finish line.

That’s something that didn’t happen on Execution, and thankfully something that didn’t happen at the Bowery B.  The band has a great, full sound – one they occasionally augmented with a pair of trumpets, a violinist and a cellist – and they managed to pump all but their limpest songs full of vigor.  The worst moments, unfortunately, involved guitarist/vocalist Blake Sennett (whose voice sounds eerily like Elliott Smith’s); for some reason, they refused to turn his mike up.  One worries that the group, heretofore a Lewis/Sennett collaboration, will become The Jenny Lewis Band.  That’s just the sort of thing major labels do.

Perhaps, though, you can’t take the Omaha out of the kids.  Sennett helped out on Tilly’s CD, and members of former label mates Now It’s Overhead intermingled with Rilo Kiley throughout their set.  It would be fantastic to see these allegiances stay strong despite changes in geography and business partners, to see the family extend without breaking.  While only time will tell – “If you want to see the future,” Oberst sings, “go stare into a cloud” – I’ll watch with hope, and interest... and of course welcome the pitter-patter of any new little feet that come along in the meanwhile.

*

Omaha’s dance-happy Faint and Tim Kasher’s folkish Good Life both come to town over the next week.  We’ll see if there’s something about which to slap together a “Part 2.”

*

The crowd at Friday’s show was just so happy when Rilo Kiley’s encore included an Iron and Wine-style cover of Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights.”  If Ben Gibbard doesn’t get another album out soon, either with Death Cab or the Service, he’s a fool; teens everywhere have been Garden Stated and O.C.’d into submission, and the time is right.

Which is my way of saying:  I hope he gets all hardcore and unlistenable quick.  I don’t want him to get Too Big, and I don’t want to be embarrassed by my CD collection. 

tags: bright eyes  tilly and the wall  rilo kiley  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    reddit