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Written by Cindy Gao Sunday, 01 April 2007 13:58

I wanted that same catharsis I had felt last summer, without the distractions of pretending to care about other people's superficial anecdotes, especially people with whom shitty social networking sites are my only contact.

The Gargoyle, St. Louis

I cleaned my room today. For those of you who don't know me (and that should be everyone...hi, Internet!), usually the only time I clean house is when I change into my ninja alter ego, kicking ass and taking names. Otherwise, I loathe housework, especially work that requires me to throw things away. I hold onto everything, always thinking that someday, sometime in the future I'll stumble upon a box of my old math quizzes from 4th grade and have a total moment and be glad that I kept them. I keep shoeboxes filled with nostalgia. One of them contains an empty box of DOTS candy my best friend Peggy bought in 6th grade from the dollar store at Chesterfield Mall the day after spending the night at my house along with my other best friend Ariana, and we ate them in the corner of my room by the green lamp counting the bangles we had bought from Claire's. This is an empty box of candy. And I have had it for years.

The other issue with cleaning my room that I have is that it requires me to actually go through the shoeboxes and candy boxes; I always stumble upon discarded items that I haven't seen in years and end up crying on the floor, clutching a relic of the not-so-distant past that I had somehow forgotten about. Is that weird? I hope not. Today I conveniently found some old concert memorabilia: setlists and drumsticks and folded-up concert tickets. And among these items was a bottle of soap bubbles, overturned on my dresser and leaking fluid onto an innocent 7". Both had been obtained at the Tilly and the Wall show at the Creepy Crawl last summer, the summer that I had had such hopes for. That concert (which I also reviewed) was probably the highlight of that disappointing summer. Sometimes, in your naïve youth you believe that music can change the world, and that show was one of those times. Am I getting too personal again? Probably, but I don't really care anymore.

So there I was at the Gargoyle last Thursday, breezing past the Wash U student who asked for my ID (I may be underage, but bitch, I'm on the list) and into the depths of the crowd, hoping to regain that wide-eyed hope. It was a reunion of sorts; I saw people I hadn't seen in months (a result of my nearly half-year long hiatus from indie-rock shows) and we exchanged the awkward conversation that I've gotten so adept at. (And judging by that conversation, everyone in St. Louis is going to the Andrew Bird show and wants to get tickets to Morrissey, so you should probably be there if you want to meet people who have last.fm profiles and generally unfunny ironic T-shirts.) Luckily I was able to avoid too much social networking and retreated outside during the opening act's set (St. Louis, please stop forming indie-pop bands with keyboards and token female backing vocalists and MySpace plugs) with my partner-in-crime for the evening, but I guess that's emblematic of how I was feeling. I figured I needed this show. I wanted that same catharsis I had felt last summer, without the distractions of pretending to care about other people's superficial anecdotes, especially people with whom shitty social networking sites are my only contact.

And finally, Tilly and the Wall takes the stage. And there I stand in the front row, belting out "Rainbows in the Dark" next to two very serious-looking people taking pictures with very serious looking digital cameras and it doesn't feel right. I know it's trite to feel jaded by people not moving at shows or whatever, but fuck...I just want to dance, assholes.

I guess there's something a little weird about having an issue with Tilly and the Wall's boundless youthful exuberance; it's like admonishing Morrissey for being too morose. But when vocalist Kianna Alarid introduces the otherwise lovely ballad "Lost Girls" as "one for all my ghetto motherfuckers," it's less endearing than annoying, the type of humor I found hilarious when I was 12. And there's the way the band revels in saying curse words; the over enunciation of the "t" sound in the word "bullshit" during "The Freest Man," reeks of middle-school locker rooms across the nation. And these people are almost 30! What the hell are they doing?

So by the time "Bad Education" rolls around the end the main set and the ladies of Tilly pull out their signature flamenco-inspired moves, I'm not exactly in the best of spirits. Yeah, I'm dancing, but by then it's more out of spite that no one else is, rather than of an uncontrollable joy so intense that my limbs feel the urge to separate themselves from my torso. I guess that's also part of having seen their shtick more than once; tap dancing gets to be a novelty the second time around. But the experience I have under my belt also helps prepare me for the encore; when Alarid asks for suggestions I scream with the best of them, "Nights of the Living Dead!" like my fucking life depended on it. By then it's been 45 minutes and I still haven't had any fun, and I fucking need to jump up and down like a kid screaming at the top of my lungs that god awful chorus of "I wanna fuck it up/ I feel so alive" with this shitty crowd who thankfully will finally move their goddamn feet and scream along with me and it won't be catharsis and it won't be therapy but at the very least, I'll have gotten my money's worth (if I had paid) and my feet will hurt like hell in the morning, a reminder of why I don't like going to these shows anymore. | Cindy Gao