Tapes 'n Tapes: Walk It Off

Both kinds of music: indie and rock

Blog-hype victims for a SXSW minute in 2006, Minneapolis’ Tapes ’N Tapes get to work on being a band on sophomore album Walk It Off. While retaining just enough self-subversion to make it sound properly indie (a voice crack here, a buried vocal there), they’re the sound of Stephen Malkmus and Isaac Brock’s spasmodically unique disaffection regularized into the pulse of modern alt-rock. “Demon Apple” is a demented blues march—Dave Fridmann’s spaciously psychedelic production framing singer Josh Grier’s promise (that “we will be in touch with time”) before a bridge leads to a thrashing coda. “Blunt” likewise builds to an explosion that owes as much to the Warped Tour’s descendents as the original Lollapa-losers. Satisfactions abound, even if Tapes ’N Tapes’ concept-free guitar hooks make them a bit hard to differentiate from other bands ’n bands.