By Sean Moeller

When I think of Tilly and the Wall, well, I think of butter knives.

I think of how the fear of a butter knife’s cut is always lower than the fear of a slice from any other knife and yet, it’s a knife. It gets to share the name with the ferocious buck knife, the fillet knife and the paring knife—all of which could give a serious enough gash—with a just a light swipe—that stitches would be the automatic first response. A butter knife’s good for butter and jam. It’s capable of almost no destruction but that which it can do to a jar of peanut butter, though it will bow slightly if forced to move through a spread that runs a little chunkier than normal.

Now, this is not to be taken as a demeaning comparison in the case of Omaha’s jolly, smiley, giggly fivesome. They are not being likened to a harmless dinner table utensil because they’re useless themselves. It’s more to say that they are this band that tap dances out its tunes of radiant, carefree beauty with a predilection for lacing their material with the frosting of a dark, black storm cloud. They don’t carry on like girl scouts and boy scouts, out for merit badges and condescending pats on the head. They don’t have a motorcycle gang. They have a bicycle gang and those bicycles are outfitted with those dime store bells that sound like cash registers opening.

That’s not to say that they haven’t laid down some serious tread marks on roads or skidded out onto some really nice pieces of lawn, leaving them in need of re-seeding. It takes a minute to realize that most of the songs on their debut “Wild Like Children” and their just-released follow-up “Bottoms of Barrels” (Team Love) are celebratory. What keeps that realization from being immediate is an underlying drama that’s regretful and urgent at the same time. They’re about living lives to the fullest, but they’re also about understanding that life can also be a cruel, carnivorous vulture sometimes and the only way to win is to rail against it. One (really, it’s just me) tends to think that in the backs of the minds of all these Tillies is the scene from “Back To School,” where a drowsy, exhausted Thornton Melon (Rodney Dangerfield) is taking his cumulative test and regains his strength to recite Dylan Thomas – “Do not go gentle into that good night/Old age should burn and rave at the close of day/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I picture Derek Pressnall, Jamie Williams, Kianna Alarid, Neely Jenkins and Nick White practicing this poem in front of a mirror and then replying just as Melon did when asked what it meant to him, saying (amid the clacking of Williams tap shoes), “It means…I don’t take shit from no one.” They likely would throw an addendum on there that explained how they were going to cherish each other and burn their candles at both ends because life is short. It’s just what you get with this band.

“Bottoms of Barrels” has even more of that dual nature than does its big sister record. It features some of those spots where the moment’s swept up with the current and the guts get the better of judgment, letting a swarm of youthful invincibility dictate the conversation. Then it has the character sketches – for the most part absent from the debut album – that are more in line with the laments of Ben Folds (see “Fred Jones, Part 2,” “Brick,” “Eddie Walker,” “Annie Waits,” “Still Fighting It,” etc.) that make the normal, course grating of everyday standards remarkably noble. These sketchings make wonder out of perceived sadness and it really is possible that it’s just perceived.

“We haven’t really talked to many journalists about the record yet,” Pressnall said back in April, the afternoon of a show in L.A. with the band opening for Jenny Lewis. “The other one that we talked to felt like it was a little sad too. To me, the first record was sadder. It felt more urgent and raw and exposed, but it was also a real hopeful record. Maybe this one is sadder, but I don’t know. It’s hard to step back. It could take two years for me to realize that it’s sadder. It does have more snapshots. It shows where we stand with the world. It’s us looking out more than us looking in at ourselves. Maybe it’s easier to not expose that which is not in us. We’re all humans too. I think as people, we try our best to live our lives to the fullest and see the good in things. I don’t really try to figure things out. I just let them do what they do.”

Pressnall, who, along with Williams will force the band to go on a month’s hiatus in August as they marry each other, said that those kinds of albums that demand 10 listens before you can define, then sufficiently appreciate them (such is the case of “Bottoms of Barrels”) are the ones that occupy him.

“There are lots of those kinds of records for me,” he said. “Cat Power’s ‘Moon Pix’ is one of those. I’d have to listen to it 200 times to maybe feel like I got my foot in the door. I’ve listened to it hundreds of times. That’s the kind of stuff I love.”

The majority of the new record was written while the band was taking advantage of a residency position at the Bemis Center For Contemporary Arts in Omaha. Mostly a visual arts establishment, the center – located near the Old Market district in downtown Omaha – happened to be looking to provide a home and inspiring work environment for its first band and they hand-chose Tilly and the Wall to spend a summer creating in their very own practice space at the center.

“We got off of tour with Of Montreal in June and we applied for this residency program. We got accepted. I don’t know how we got accepted,” Pressnall said. “They were just looking for a band right then. They gave us a huge space to work in for three or four months. They basically just gave us a place to create art. They didn’t really give us anything else, but they did give us a refrigerator and they kept it filled with water for us all the time. And they gave us some furniture.”

One thing “Barrels” will do is it’s going to make all those tap questions obsolete. It will seem trite, but it will be absolutely okay to ask to see those pictures from the wedding and make comments about how gorgeous Jamie’s dress was. That kind of thing will be okay.

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