Tapes 'n Tapes Walk It Off by: Thomas Mendelovitis Mon:09-Jun-08 Label: XL Year: 2008 WB rating 63 out of 100

Tapes ‘n Tapes have a lot on the line and you can sense it in everything about them: reading through YouTube comments, in the album title itself and even in the press release accompanying their second album, Walk It Off. Before hearing their new album, Australian distributor Remote Control has chosen to quote NME (“believe the hype”) and The Sun (“the hype is justified”). If critics listen to critics, let’s get academic. This is what Vice said about Walk It Off: “this band’s whole career is a figment of Pitchfork’s imagination. What a tuneless, soulless piece of crap this is”. Comparisons to the Pixies and Pavement do not help their case: indeed, they miss the point entirely. Of course, Tapes ‘n Tapes are more akin to those bands than to Fleetwood Mac or Simon and Garfunkel, but in implying a timeless value, any shred of worth found in their songs is immediately hoisted to a platform way above the level field on which criticism must begin. As a band touted as the saviours of indie-rock with debut The Loon, it’s hard to cut through the hyperbole and not be swayed to either pole of critique.

Walk It Off continues in the riff/groove-driven, vein of 2006’s The Loon but improves somewhat on their formula with some canny arrangements and unexpected song structures. Handsomely recorded by uber-producer Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips and more recently, MGMT), Walk It Off definitely has intent. Whether that intent is unified across the album’s 12 tracks is another question. Music can do a lot of things, and it seems that the quartet, with new-found confidence and presumably a bigger recording budget, are out to do them all. Opener ‘Le Ruse’ is a lithe and fuzzy slice of what has become perhaps classic ‘indie-rock’, boisterous and uplifting like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! can be. The vocal refrain (“we’ve been trying to hold you up to keep you safe you from the fall”), however, has none of CYHSY’s skewed subtlety. This sentimental bent is followed in ‘Time of Songs’, a highpoint of an album built mostly on interesting, idiosyncratic, rhythmic melodies.

These two are perhaps the album’s best and elsewhere the band seems obsessed with providing a broad emotional palette. ‘Hang Them All’ and the album’s worst track ‘The Dirty Dirty’ are substandard funk-punk in an age of bands devoting their whole oeuvre to this sound. As the album closer, ‘The Dirty Dirty’ leaves a nasty taste in the mouth and makes one question the veracity of the preceding tracks. The transmission of wisdom/insight/wit/poetry/whatever through lyrics is not songwriter Josh Grier’s strength – structure and melody are – and on the majority of tracks we don’t hear the words. On ‘The Dirty Dirty’, though, his obsession to make meaning is quite distressing. Over an almost cynically aggressive backbeat and angular guitar riff, Grier sings: “hard sums, sharp tolls, when your heart and when you’re tonguing money/I’m in the hold and I’ve been holding money” which moves into the repeated refrain: “where did all the money go, where did all the money go?” It all fits, but you smell a rat.

With the problems outlined above one may be left with a vacuous feeling at the end of the album. Contributing to this sensation are tracks referencing past greats. ‘Demon Apples’ begins with what must be a homage to Pavement’s classic ‘Stereo’, while it’s not hard to guess why ‘George Michael’ was so titled: the rhythmically strummed opening chord is a dead ringer for ‘Faith’. For all that, it’s hard to totally dismiss Tapes ‘n Tapes. They are moderately interesting and avoid most of the infuriating pitfalls of overly hyped bands. It’s easy to brush aside Walk It Off as a record amounting to much less than the sum of its parts but in creating an average record, the overriding feeling is like you’ve eaten a lot, but digested nothing.