The self-titled debut album of the band Baby Walrus was released by Slumber Party Records on February 5. You may not know it yet, but that’s excellent news for you.

Baby Walrus is a group of three young musicians out of Omaha who have been playing together since 2005, and they’ve gained a considerable amount of attention on their local scene. While such a thing isn’t uncommon, what is rather unusual is the fact that all of that attention has been overwhelmingly positive. A quick glance around the internet reveals that anyone with anything to say about the Omaha scene has listed the band at or near the top of the best up-and-coming local music. The group is in the perfect position to be releasing their debut, and it can’t possibly be long before people well outside the boxy borders of Nebraska are listening.

The history of Baby Walrus is short and simple—so simple that the complexity of their sound may be surprising to those who believe that intellectual music takes a very precise and pre-planned collection of musicians. Each of the three members has a history in the Omaha scene; two of the three, John Voris and Chris Senseney, were formerly members of Le Beat, an experimental art-style band that garnered its own amount of local prestige. In 2005, Le Beat’s bassist departed and the two continued as a duo for awhile before adding long-time friend and fellow musician, Dylan Strimple, to the group. Voris and Strimple had also played together previously in Saddle Creek Records’ Son, Ambulance. “We’d known Dylan for years and had talked before about playing together, so it was a natural choice,” says Senseney. The result of this friendly grouping is a cohesive, winningly original, practically affable sound that’s easy to love. And love it people do.

Baby Walrus is what can only be described as intelligent music. It’s so common for a band to throw together an eclectic mix of seemingly unrelated sounds and instruments in an attempt to create cohesion, and come up instead with something that sounds discordant or unfocused. Not so here: the chemistry that pops out of the songs and weaves them together works well enough to perk up the ears of anyone standing around waiting for the headlining band. Baby Walrus makes the incredibly complicated seem incredibly easy.

In many cases, music like this can walk a fine line between sounding genuinely smart and merely sounding pretentious, but Baby Walrus manages to prod your brain without producing eye rolls. And conquering such a variety of songs is no small feat. Some songs have a nearly lush, throaty quality to the vocals, surrounded by an efficient shuffle of background noise that sounds half-asleep; other songs deconstruct into a cacophony that pulls you along with it, like the feeling of breathing all the air out of your lungs—impossible to keep up for long, but it just keeps coming, leaving you a little exhilarated when it’s over. The members of Baby Walrus are masters of multi-instrumentalism, using such diverse tools as bells, accordions, banjos, harpsichords, and even drills to build their songs from the ground up. And it works. Unlike a fair amount of bands that try these tricks on for size, you kind of want Baby Walrus instrumentals to go on forever.

The music defies categories, standing on the musical equivalent of the four corners, with a foot in each realm; it’s not quite art-rock, nor alt-rock, nor is it really, at all, the blues; although it borrows from various areas, choosing a title for it seems merely counterproductive, not to mention impossible. “It’s like fucked-up folk music,” says Strimple, which is better than any label I could have thought up myself.

While they cheerfully list a huge collection of influences on their MySpace page (among them Dock Boggs, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Ornette Coleman, Townes Van Zandt, Harvest, Requiem, and Rain Dogs) Baby Walrus is not attempting anything so commonplace as an imitation of what’s come before. They clearly understand—and respect—the miles-wide division between inspiration and re-creation. “There’s a lot of influence for me from older music, music that seems stark and direct but also a step removed from my surroundings,” says Senseney. “At the same time, I have no desire to pretend I’m an old bluesman or a coal-miner. I don’t want to write historical fiction.”

While Senseney is the main producer of song ideas and chord progressions, the band has no real rule for how they go about writing their songs. “I like the beard-stroking part of making music, dwelling on arrangements and tweaking details,” says Voris. But the process of writing and producing varies each time, which may help explain the consistent freshness of what they’re creating. “We don’t have a formula,” Strimple replies when asked. Considering the way things are going, they certainly shouldn’t set out to create one.

When asked about their plans for the upcoming year, the band’s response is simple. “We’re planning on touring as much as possible this year, and are in the preparatory stages of making our next record. We’d like to put out a record a year if we can.” This is good news for all of us.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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