Tapes ’n Tapes
Walk it Off
XL Records
Sometimes, pop music is all about imprinting. Like a cartoon duckling who quacks “mama”at the first living creature it sees, the music fan’s initial exposure to a band or a singer is the all-important moment that determines everything that is to follow.
For instance, if you only heard Vampire Weekend after the release of their critically acclaimed debut record, you might wonder why all this fuss was being made over a bit of warmed-over reggaeton — and gleefully join the backlash.
So what to make of Tapes ’n Tapes, the idiosyncratic, hyperliterate Minneapolis quartet headed by Carelton College graduate and still gainfully employed data analyst Josh Grier?
Rock journos out of the Twin Cities are almost obscenely effusive in their praise, hailing Mr. Grier’s band as the best to emerge from those frozen wastes since the Replacements and Husker Du.
I hadn’t heard their 2005 breakout record, “The Loon,” before listening to their sophomore effort, “Walk it Off.” But it’s easy to see how the inevitable backlash will strike as fans will wonder what happened to the homespun, raw, distorted feel of their early work. Where “The Loon” is a little like a post-punk genre sampler, “Walk it Off” feels like an effort to fashion a sound that incorporates hooks and melody lines that are unapologetically pretty.
This is most apparent on “Conquest,” a Modest Mouse-influenced song that mixes a heavy drum beat with a terse, halting guitar line that manages at once to be plodding and airy.
Their post-punk roots are exposed in all their bleached-out splendor on the opening track, “Le Ruse,” a pure Fender stratocaster distortion a-la Green Day. The guitar gets a little more corpulent on “Demon Apple,”a slow punk-inflected blues that sounds like the intro of Led Zeppelin’s “How Many More Times” played in three-quarter time.
On “George Michael,” so named, it would appear, for the acoustic guitar part lifted nearly intact from “Faith,” keyboard player Matt Kretzmann and producer Dave Fridmann deploy a theremin-like looping sound to craft an eerie harmonic effect.
What’s missing from “Walk it Off’ is the playfulness that informed the weird, eclectic and often nonsensical songs of “The Loon,” like the track “The Insistor,” featuring the chorus, “And when you rush I’ll call your name/ Like Harvard Square holds all inane/ And don’t you know I’ll be your badger.”
The difference, I think, is that “The Loon” was true indie-rock — slopped together with the mix of obsession and inexperience that characterizes the label. While “Walk it Off” is eminently listenable and far from slick, some of the early fans of Tapes ’n Tapes will be forgiven for wondering what happened to the weird, pointless, fun little band they stumbled upon.
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