monoceros blogsHere is yet another music post, but it's one I must write because Tally Hall is a band from Ann Arbor, a band from my alma mater, the University of Michigan! Go Blue!
I always find out about the good stuff only after it becomes far less accessible. But at least I find out about it, thanks in no small part to Lim Jia, trumpet and harpsichord player who's in town to obtain her German student visa (she's about to begin harpsichord classes in Berlin). Her main squeeze, Jake, is friends with Andrew Horowitz, a former music student from U of M. Andrew and four other fellows make up Tally Hall, named for a closed-down strip mall in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
They don't have any particular style - that is, they do all styles - and they like to call their music "wonky" or "fabloo." A quick listen of their debut album confirms that you can't really pin them down to a certain type of music. There's the rap-like "Welcome to Tally Hall" and the Jamaican-sounding "Banana Man," whose lyrics are quite absurd but still catchy. It's a head-bopping, danceable song, like many of the others on the CD, and I cannot get the tune out of my head. And the music video is something else. It's filmed in Ann Arbor, and you really feel that the guys are tripping on something. Okay, probably tripping on the fun of it all. It helps that one of the band members was a film student; the short films on their website are hilarious and very strange.
They do enjoy what they're doing, and according to Jake, they got their degrees as sensible young men are supposed to, but they weren't afraid to indulge their crazy, talented sides, which have taken them pretty far. They've had appearances on national TV - MTV and late night shows - and had one of their songs play on an episode of "The O.C."
I also found out that although Andrew Horowitz was primarily a pianist at college, he also wrote collaborative pieces for tuba and piano, and alternative, world, folk music and rap. Those works go under the name of Baker Broz or (Bros). He's also won Hopwood prizes for fiction and poetry, and Hopwoods are the writing awards to win when you're at UM.
So the band writes their own music, makes their own videos, gives rad live performances, and have a made-up name - fabloo - for their particular style of music. And as much as I'd like to watch them in concert, I'll have to make do with their CD, which I begged a friend traveling to the US to bring back for me.
