Tapes Rolling

On April 8, Tapes ’N Tapes releases Walk It Off, possibly the most anticipated local rock album since—let’s just go crazy with this—The Replacements’ Let It Be. It’s a huge artistic step forward; a band known for wicked sweet nothings finally has something to say about the creepy, post-just-about-everything world we live in. Fan sites are buzzing. Bona fide rock-star status awaits.

But frontman Josh Grier is still keeping his day job.

Grier has worked as a data analyst at a health benefits-administration company ever since graduating from Carleton. Clearly, he has a cool boss—a supervisor who’s OK with seeing an empty cubicle for months at a time, starting in the spring of 2006, when Tapes ’N Tapes was plucked from CD-release-party-at-the-Turf Club obscurity on the strength of their first full-length album, The Loon, which garnered a gushing review on the national indie kingmaking dot-com Pitchfork, propelling T’NT to a deal with XL Recordings, pictures in Rolling Stone, an appearance on Letterman, and tours of the United States, Europe, and Japan.

The Replacements, dude? Really? I know, comparisons to The Replacements amount to blasphemy in Minnesota, but there really is no local indie rock model for Tapes ’N Tapes’ success. Think about it: The Loon has only moved about 50,000 copies in the United States so far, with a lot of those sold out of the back of the band’s own van. Those modest sales, along with a successful if grueling tour for The Loon and, yes, their day jobs, have earned Grier and his bandmates enough money to make the car and house payments. But in this day and age, with the Internet’s pitiless appetite for the new, a band can go through a hyper-accelerated Behind the Music cycle of rise/backlash/backlash-to-the-backlash long before selling its first gold record.

A case in point: Those 50,000 records have spawned almost as many snarky, hand-wringing blog postings questioning how good The Loon’s follow-up could possibly be. When “Hang Them All,” the first single on Walk It Off, was leaked to the Web back in February, Vulture, New York mag’s entertainment and culture blog, was one of the first to weigh in with a snap judgment. Their headline? “Tapes ’N Tapes Comeback Is Impressively Executed.”

Yes, releasing a second album is now considered a comeback.

Can you see why Grier kept that day job?

Grier didn’t keep the job out of follow-up anxiety. He kept it because he’s good at it. And he’s good at it because he actually likes analyzing data.

Grier’s head contains that certain shade of gray matter that’s actually stimulated by numbers and patterns. When he’s onstage and he’s got that schizo, middle-distance, crazed-maniac look going, he doesn’t seem like a math geek (maybe a little during the awkward between-song banter), but Grier was a math major at Carleton, back when he played in Luntz of Blaine, his first band, with classmate Steve Nelson, before the two math geeks started Tapes ’N Tapes after graduation. It wouldn’t be fair to categorize Tapes ’N Tapes music as “math rock”—there’s too much punk-rock spaz in it—but Grier is obsessive about avoiding cliché in his patterns. “I am always messing with song structures,” Grier says. “You gotta try to keep it interesting for yourself.”

Since the very beginning, Tapes ’N Tapes has gone through several personnel changes, but the songs have all started on the same computer, with Grier sitting down with a guitar and some drum-machine software and banging out demos for the rest of the band to study. The latest lineup—Grier, Matt Kretzmann on keyboards, Erik Appelwick on bass, and Jeremy Hanson on drums—has been playing together for almost two years now, and according to Grier, the stability has helped streamline the process from demo to completed song. “Now when I show up at practice and go, ‘Here’s a new demo,’ they know what to expect.” He pauses. “As opposed to a demo that, uh, sounds really good.”

The band’s name came from an old joke about Grier’s propensity for tweaking, for endless experimentation: “tapes and tapes of bullshit.” There’s a DIY aesthetic to his process too—in 2004, the band self-recorded their first seven-song EP on a four-track in the middle of the woods at Kretzman’s parents’ cabin in Webster, Wisconsin. The same year, Appelwick, who was a producer at the time, approached Grier and urged him to “do it right this time.” In 2005, the band recorded and mixed The Loon over “nine business days” in Appelwick’s ex-bandmate Darren “Kid Dakota” Jackson’s studio in Northeast Minneapolis.

For Walk It Off, however, XL Recordings was footing the bill, so the band picked out a big-time producer, Dave Fridmann (Sleater–Kinney, Flaming Lips) and recorded at Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, in upstate New York.

This time, the cabin in the woods was bigger and nicer (Tarbox Road is a large house converted into a studio with a living space the guys stayed in), but their approach didn’t change much. “I need deadlines with this kind of stuff,” says Grier. “On The Loon, I took it back and I slept with it. I dumped all the tracks in and I put some extra stuff on top of it and I messed with it for a month, but I could’ve messed with it forever.”

On Walk It Off, Grier set his own deadline. With the pressure on, with new car payments, mortgages, wives, and girlfriends waiting, with the Internet’s denizens of snarkulation ready to rip on the band’s sophomore effort—Grier decided not to take three months to record Walk It Off.

“I wanted it to be the way we’ve always operated,” Grier says. “I [thought], ‘Let’s give ourselves three weeks, and we’ll show up with everything good to go.’ ”

By go time (September 2007), they had been touring The Loon for almost a year and a half, with Grier finally getting an opportunity to write new songs in January of 2007. The band started touring again in the spring of ’07, working the demos out on the road, playing four or five new songs in their set throughout the spring and into the summer, and practicing the other new songs regularly.

The Loon had blown up so suddenly that Grier felt no pressure to respond to expectations on the part of either new fans or fanemies. “You know, I never presumed that anybody would like our music,” Grier says. “When people did, on one hand it made it a little more like ‘Oh, people might care if the record sucks.’ But at the same time, people liked it when we weren’t caring before, so all the more reason to keep believing that we should do what we wanna do now.”
Here’s an HR tip for Grier’s boss: It’s time to worry about covering some more shifts. Because Walk It Off is the best local rock record since . . . well, I’m not going to do it to you twice. Go ahead and think of your own overblown analogy—but Walk It Off is good enough to provoke plenty more blasphemy.

Tapes ’N Tapes’ mathematic idiosyncrasy is intact, but there are fewer quirky sound effects and the band sounds fuller, louder, and more direct. Where Grier shows the most growth is in his lyrics. Walk It Off is the first Tapes ’N Tapes record on which he sounds like he actually has something to say.

Back in 2004, when I wrote about their first EP for City Pages, there was something compelling about this band, but I struggled to describe it. The music had a weird nervous energy, but the lyrics existed somewhere between Dadaism and complete inanity. At the time, I remember Grier laughed and admitted, “None of these songs are about f***ing anything.” But that wasn’t exactly true, because there was “Moldy Bread,” a song infused with equal parts ennui and dissatisfaction, and it was about something—it was about not being able to make a sandwich.

Granted, “Moldy Bread” was written when Grier was a bachelor just out of college, but as T’NT’s musical scope matured and expanded into something more expressive on The Loon, the lyrics remained inscrutable.

Grier’s voice almost trembles with resignation about “ten-gallon ascots/ and beer on your shirt,” and then he gets really angry about it. Or in the middle of The Loon’s single “Insistor,” during the Blondie spoken word part, Grier mumbles something that sounds desperate and wounded—even threatening—about someone he doesn’t really trust enough to fight for named Kelly.

Walk It Off has maintained that nervy energy and the poetry remains obtuse, but there is a cohesive point of view—Grier has trained his dissatisfaction and anger on more collectively shared fears. Walk isn’t exactly an indie rock protest album, but by the end of the record a definite theme has emerged. The first single, “Hang Them All,” has a nasty, video-game attack of a bassline and a massive chorus that insists “they” need to bleed for something, that we need to “hang them alllllll.” On “Conquest,” Grier sings about a lonely walk through “miles and miles of bones.” And on “Demon Apple,” he screams over and over, “You’re training them all/you traded them all.”

And then there’s the last song. Even if you hate everything T’NT has ever done, “The Dirty Dirty” is an undeniable look over the cliff, into the void. Against the mechanical, martial thump of T’NT’s fused rhythm section, Grier growls, “Sold homes/frail forms . . . where did all the money go?/Where did all the money go?/Where did all the money go?”

“The Dirty Dirty” is definitely about something; not that you’ll ever get Grier to admit to it. “There’s definitely a lot of stuff going on,” he says. “But other than [having you] listen to the record itself, I can’t vocalize that this means this or this means that.”

Such cool deflections are where Grier’s growth is perhaps most impressive. Maybe ignoring all the attention has taught him that he doesn’t need to explain anything, so he can write songs that don’t need any explanation.
 
If Walk It Off gets the attention it deserves, the only person Grier will need to explain anything to is his boss.