Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 24/7/06
Label: XL Recording

You might have imagined that "alterno" - however ugly and debased a term - would have it covered, but no. Chart-hogging acts as disparate as Arctic Monkeys and Keane have shunted the idea of "alternative" so far into the mainstream that they risk crashing into leftfield traffic coming the other way. In the USA, college radio, saturation blogging and "The OC" help with demarcation, but it's aeons since "indie" meant anything at all. Now, we need some other way to properly describe bands such as Tapes 'n Tapes.

Were they a one-off it might be easier, but the Minneapolis four piece belong to a pack of emergent North American bands - Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Wolf Parade among them - whose roots are in post-punk / grunge and slacker pop, but who have a far wider reach and achieved critical mass with staggering speed. After their rapturously received shows (and a resultant A&R scrum) at this year's SXSW festival, Tapes 'n Tapes are the latest lot shouldering the next-big-thing burden.

"The Loon" is their debut album, recorded (in 2005), engineered and mixed by bassist Erik Appelwick. Following the same DIY method as CYHSY, the band then packaged and shipped it to buyers (over 10,000 of them since last November) from their own bedrooms. Such get-go is admirable and, as a modus operandi, it clearly pays off. So much for the buzz and their brio, but…does Tapes 'n Tapes' music do the business?

Sometimes, is the short answer. Best described as eccentric indie pop, it leans so heavily on Pavement and Pixies that Messrs Malkmus and Black should consider giving their lawyers a call. Chief Tape Josh Grier even borrows Malkmus's voice, rather than develop his own strangulated yelp. Many of the album's songs are built around strummed guitar rather than structured parts, tricked out with Farfisa, flute, xylophone, synths, euphonium and cowbells to disguise their simple structure and up the energy ante.

They've half-inched Pere Ubu's arty spikiness (for "In Houston"), the skronky punk of Trumans Water ("Crazy Eights") and Pixies' muscular angst (pretty much everywhere, but particularly on "The Iliad" and lead single "Insistor"), throwing occasional neat curveballs via hardcore and the spaghetti western soundtrack. Were it possible to ignore Tapes 'n Tapes' Pavement and Pixies fixation, we'd still be left with Grier's irritatingly obtuse lyrics ("Kelly hold your water / and as you rush I'll call your name like Harvard Square holds all inane / and don't you know I'll be your badger"), which suggest a struggling English undergrad's idea of surreal poeticism.

To be fair, "The Loon" stops short of pastiche, but it is too transparently a paean to Tape 'n Tapes' heroes. The bunting, it seems, has been prematurely unfurled.

    by Sharon O'Connell