Brevity is the soul of anti-hype when it comes to web reviews of up-and-comers these days. So: Here is a new band of bright young things from Chicago who could do some real cool things in a few years. Tirra Lirra have hit on a distinctive, droning, avant-palatable niche with just-right influences that they should be able to mine richly after a couple more zaps in the scenecubator. Like the bands referenced above, they’re founded on the old guitar-and-drum skeleton, draping electronic vagaries, loops, and atmosphere on its frame to hint at something that’s not really post-rock or post-punk or post-anything so much as it is floating somewhere above those genre signifiers in the psych aether.
The percussion sounds distant, malleted, and muted, like the rhythm of some ancient ritual taking place on the next mountaintop over from the one where the singer is sitting, hearing his indistinct words drift back from a delay pedal like the echo of the valley below. The guitar figures are similarly languorous and delayed, ringing out without really moving anywhere and leaving the real sonic exploration to the electronics. Fat modular synths are everywhere on this CD, burbling and swirling to affect most of the changes that happen over the course of these occasionally interminable tunes. Tirra Lirra are practically the opposite of fellow Chicagoans The Fiery Furnaces, putting as few hooks as possible into these songs to chase the Riley-Reich-Young dream of revelation through repetition. The 13-minute opener “Pale” is the fullest exploration of that minimalist philosophy, which is a relief given that those developments often rest too heavily on a few twirls of delay-pedal knobs.
Shit, did I mention delay again? There’s the biggest problem with this callow band: They rely way too much on fancy guitar pedals (if not just one fancy pedal — hold on) to do their work for them. Again, this is especially true for the vocals and guitar. I’m willing to bet these guys have at least one Line 6 DL4 delay modeler, if everyone in the band doesn’t already have their own. It’s a stellar piece of equipment, today’s must-have addition to any axe-slinger’s arsenal, and its loop function has made Andrew Bird’s entire career possible, but it’s also 90 percent responsible for making delay to the ’00s what chorus was to the ’80s: overwrought and inescapable, veering dangerously close to cliché via sheer overuse in unnecessary situations. Tirra Lirra are guilty of precisely that crime because, as so many young bands do, they substitute technological innovation for musical cohesion and cross their fingers that the audience won’t catch on (plenty of critics still haven’t, when it comes to other acts pulling the same trick with the same equipment. Are you there, Castanets? It’s me, Gearhead McHaterade).
But this is their debut! Cut ‘em some slack, Norton. The band really comes into its own on the second half of Breathe Bodies, with the trio of “Evening Gentlemen,” the title track, and “Alabaster.” The comparatively shorter song lengths, from four and a half to seven and a half minutes, are much better suited to Tirra Lirra’s strengths (at least at this early stage): long enough for them to stretch out and get interesting with the simple melodic themes, short enough for those themes to head out the door before things gets awkward. And the tracks currently up on their MySpace, presumably newer, show Tirra Lirra moving away from those tics for which this reviewer may be unduly chastising them. There’s a lot of promise here: the seeds are planted and watered, but that’s it so far. Far be it from me to make any calls this early in the game, but it’s looking good.
Bottom line: This band is about textural, not melodic, development, and your enjoyment of their debut will correlate directly with your patience and appreciation for the former over the latter.
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