June 6, 2006
Music Review | 'Tapes 'n Tapes'
The NY Times
Tapes 'n Tapes, Bloggers' Darling, Keeps Its Shagginess Intact
By SIA MICHEL
Tapes 'n Tapes is indie rock's latest Internet-driven mini-success story, which is no surprise. This charmingly nerdy quartet is just the kind of band a blogger loves. It makes hazily majestic, slightly experimental indie pop that honors at least two forefathers (Pavement and the Pixies). Its members do not come from a hipster enclave. (They're from Minneapolis.) They have a babe-in-the-woods origin story (literally: they recorded their 2004 EP in a freezing cabin in a Wisconsin forest).
Most important, their work seems humble, as if they aren't quite sure they deserve to be liked. When the record labels came calling, bloggers got to feel good about themselves, as if they had saved nice guys from a sad life of dive bars and bowling alleys.
Just six months ago, Tapes 'n Tapes played a string of small, half-full clubs in New York, supporting its self-released debut, "The Loon." By April it had signed to XL Recordings, which is reissuing that album in late July. And on Sunday the group headlined the 550-capacity Bowery Ballroom.
If the band was nervous about its accelerated trajectory, it didn't show. With blank expressions the members strode onstage and quickly tore into "Just Drums," the first song on "The Loon." Despite matchstick arms, Jeremy Hanson, a bespectacled teenager, pummeled his kit as if he were knocking down drywall with a sledgehammer.
A few songs later, after a similarly ferocious interpretation of the iridescent ballad "Manitoba," the band's plan was clear. It was going to play fast and hard to fill the large room, even if that meant losing the mystical beauty of its slower songs. It often seemed as if it were channeling the goofy theatrics of Arcade Fire.
During "Icedbergs" the keyboardist, Matt Kretzmann, grabbed a tambourine and smacked the drum cymbals with it, jumping around in a fit of wild-man ecstasy. Then a gyrating Erik Appelwick almost dropped his bass guitar. "The other day, in the middle of rocking out, he broke his strap and decided to fix it with a toothpick," the vocalist Josh Grier said as Mr. Appelwick applied duct tape. "As they say in the circus, the show must go on."
It was shaggily endearing, and though Tapes 'n Tapes hasn't been together long, the members perform with an almost telepathic rapport. At one point the singer and the bassist faced each other, playing furiously with their legs spread wide, like heavy-metal droogs. What's great about the band's music is the way it crams many different moods and dynamics into a single elliptical song.
Live, Tapes 'n Tapes struck one energetic note for the entire set. The band has all the buzz it could want, but it still lacks the confidence to develop a complex live identity of its own. And that, of course, will make some bloggers like it even more.
Tapes 'n Tapes returns tonight to the Bowery Ballroom. The show is sold out.
