Tapes Rolling

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.