The first time I saw Tirra Lirra, in the fall of 2006, I tried to listen with an open mind, but what they were doing just sounded like noisy, self-indulgent guitar jams to me. Trouble was, I couldn’t tell whether I hated it because my relationship with front man Hank Henry is what I’d have to call “complicated” if I were friending him on Facebook—we used to be roommates and then had a girl-related falling-out—or because they were in fact kicking some real bullshit.
At that point Henry, Sheldon, guitarist Chris Mathis, and modular-synth guy Tony Janas had been playing together for about a year. Their ideas—aside from Henry sitting at a desk to play—seemed pretty decent, but most of them were still hazy, so that what was supposed to be an experimental reimagining of the standard rock combo came off like a bunch of guys too lazy to do any actual songwriting and taking forever to get from point A to point B. “It was just jamming,” says Henry. “We have tapes and tapes of the stuff. They’re on our Web site in this secret folder, and we revisit them sometimes. It’s like this other world of ridiculousness. For some reason we never made songs for so long.”
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Judging from a CD-R of recent practice-space demos, the first Tirra Lirra LP—which the band plans to record this year—could make the leap from good to great. The first of those demo tunes, the stunning “We Are All Strays,” begins with droning guitar and rolling drums and quickly expands into a minor epic, riding a wash of distortion through an unexpected major-key progression to a triumphant high. If you replaced the eccentric parts of Tirra Lirra’s instrumentation—Jesus and Mary Chain guitar noise, something that sounds like a looped snippet of backward strings—with standard alt-rock guitar crunch, the song would be ready for Q101. For some reason this half-and-half approach strikes me as even more perverse than making uncut noise—it’s like the band has taken beard-stroker art music, put it behind the wheel of a sports car, and told it to go nuts.
Mon 1/21, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600.
