Artists
Biography
The Brothers Tapes are: Josh Grier (lead vocals / guitar), Jeremy Hanson (drums), Matt Kretzmann (keyboard / tamborine / backing-vocals), Erik Appelwick (bass / backing-vocals).
The whole thing, Josh Grier says, was the drummer’s fault. The members of Minneapolis- based Tapes ‘N Tapes were drinking beers, talking about the last time they saw a quarterback get fully pummeled in a football game—not just taken down, but full-on, kick-your-chin-through-the-back-of-your-head obliterated—when percussionist Jeremy Hanson said it: “When that happens, you just gotta walk it off.” Maybe it was the Pabst, but that line sounded like it meant something. “We all stopped because, in a way, that’s what our album’s about,” says Grier, “When you get beat down, you have to pick up and move on. You just have to walk it off.”
There are really only two kinds of walking. There’s the kind you do because you’re going somewhere, and there’s the kind you do because you just have to keep going. Because if you stop, you’ll never get started again. Tapes ‘N Tapes’ second record is about the second kind of walking, the one you do when what’s on your mind lately is credit card debt and lost jobs and wearing a shirt that’s two sizes too small and yelling at the best people you know for reasons you don’t understand and mostly feeling like giving up but still moving forward anyway. That kind of walking, it’s like fighting for something.
After over a year of cross continent touring that saw them playing both Lollapalooza and Coachella, the band hunkered down with producer Dave Fridmann, (Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods, Flaming Lips) in his isolated upstate New York studio and recorded and mixed the entire album in just three short weeks. On the opener, “Le Ruse,” the first thing you hear is one guitar, crackling like the amp might short-circuit. It’s a small sound, but it gets bigger and bigger until the drums kick in. Then that small sound erupts into a shock of fuzzed-out riffs, anchored by rolling bass lines, sputtering church-organ synths, and a hard, loud beat. . And somewhere in the middle of it all, Josh Grier is singing: “We’ve been trying to hold you up to keep you safe from the fall.” That line could be some form of encouragement, or it could be a warning. Either way, it makes you want to hold on.
Moments like that, you almost feel the same immediate, front-row wallop of hearing the Pixies or Pavement play live, which might be why critics from the New York Times to Pitchfork compared Tapes ‘N Tapes’ talent to those bands on their debut album in 2006, The Loon. Except those comparisons aren’t quite right, because Tapes ‘N Tapes’ sound is distinctly their own: the shaky vocals, the bursts of low-fi guitars, the haunting keyboard refrains, and something else you can’t quite place. Something that’s there in “Hang Them All,” when the quiet verse drops out and an awesomely muddy blend of guitars surges in. Or in “Lines,” which begins as a ballad suddenly burns up into an epic call-to-arms with military drums and fierce, barked vocals. Or in “The Dirty Dirty,” with its driving guitar and unrelenting rhythm. It’s something that, like the kind of walk the record was named for, makes you feel a little different when you come out of it than you did going into it. Something that’s strange and gritty and delicate and furious. And thrilling.