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You may have heard of Tapes 'n Tapes, you may not. If your answer be the former - don't worry you soon will. Six months ago they were simply four guys from Minneapolis then they released what many are heralding as the breakthrough American album of the year. They are no longer just four guys from Minneapolis. 'The Loon' has sold faster than the band can post them out of their back room, and they’ve recently been signed to hipper than hip label XL Recordings, home of The White Stripes and Be Your Own Pet. Add to that a sold out British tour, becoming the talk of SXSW, gigs with the Futureheads and beers with the Streets, and you’ve got a pretty persuasive argument that these guys could very quickly become "the next big thing".
Which has all come as quite a surprise to the four neatly turned out, nervous young gentlemen Gigwise meets in a Charing Cross Road bar before their first ever London gig. Vocalist Josh Grier, drummer Jeremy Hanson, bassist cum producer Erik Appelwick and Matt Kretzmann, keyboard player and brass section sip pints of Guinness and look a little nonplussed about the year that has taken them from recording an ep in a shed on a mountain to becoming this year’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. “It’s awesome, y’know,” says the unassuming Grier (everything in Tapes’ world is ‘awesome.’ Gigs are ‘awesome.’ Fans are ‘awesome.’ Arsenal’s crushing Champions League loss to Barcelona was ‘awesome.’) “It definitely wasn’t something we had in mind when we were recording it. We weren’t like, here’s the plan, in the next year we’ll release it in the UK. It’s all very flattering.”
But the fuss isn’t so surprising once you take a listen to their debut album. Immediate, catchy and eclectic, 'The Loon' is a rough-edged diamond of a pop record. As lo-fi as Pavement, as tuneful as The Strokes and as varied as Arcade Fire, it looks set to hit all good end of year top 20’s, and in singles like ‘Insistor’ and ‘Cowbell,’ TnT will be mainstays at indie discos throughout the summer. “The reason the album’s so eclectic is that it comes from a whole bunch of people,” says Josh. “I started with my roommate Steve, who knew Matt, and Matt played trombone, so we thought he’d be a natural bass player. Then he went back to being brass section when Erik, who produced our record, became our bass player. Then Steve went off to grad school, and our drummer left and we found Jeremy. Y’know, people have migrated and moved, so we generally try to stay away from writing two songs that sound the same." After recording an EP in what they called a, "shack on a hill with no running water," in the middle of a particularly gruelling midwest winter, the band camped down in the comparatively hospitable surroundings of Erik's friends basement, and whipped up 'The Loon' in a matter of days. Running a record label out of a back room somewhere in Minneapolis began to pay off - online orders began flooding in, and eventually the majors started sniffing around the four geeky guys who sounded like, as their website so eloquently puts it "the redheaded stepchild of Frank Black and Stephen Malkmus."
After a mammoth set of 8 gigs in 5 days at Austin's SXSW, TnT were picked up by the underground music press (Obviously Gigwise picked them up way before that, back in the cold month of February) and held up as the latest in a long line of saviours in scuffed converse. Luckily, however, the band didn't let the growing adulation go to their heads. "When we were down there it didn’t seem like (we were big)," says remarkably shy drummer, and professional Peter Parker lookalike Jeremy. "We were running around so much we didn’t have time for champagne and caviar, it was always like pack up, next show, next show." This relaxed attitude to the pressures of fame pays off, the band are as down to earth a bunch that you'd ever hope to meet, and some of them, amazingly, still work full time in the States. "I do data analysis," says Josh, managing to keep a straight face. "I work in a cube. They’re really cool about it, I’m like the resident rockstar." "I used to project manage for a housing developer," says Matt, almost sheepishly. Jeremy won't admit to what he does, but he mutters darkly about "threats of termination," when he gets back.
It's a credit to the band that even tales of nights of excess with passing musicians in Minneapolis fail to exhibit any signs of rock star cockiness. "We got to play when The Futureheads came through town," says Josh, (which was, predictably 'awesome') "and when we played with The Streets we had the most bizarre night. All the audience were expecting Dizzee Rascal, and when we came out on stage everyone was like 'what the fuck?!' The first two rows loved us, but the rest of the venue were just 'Do some rapping!' Mike Skinner was super nice though, he gave us his beer." They even, gasp, interact with their fans, and run their own website, despite it mostly being...well, a drawing of a tape. "I used to do it at work," Josh grins. "Before we released the album we had this long flash popup with these rocks and these tapes and things… but no-one could ever get into our site because it was so confusing, so now it’s just a drawing of a tape."
Tapes eh? In an age where digital downloads have made traditional home-recording almost obsolete, why give yourself such a self-consciously quirky moniker? “It was really from when me and our old guitarist Steve sat up for two or three nights of getting drunk in the kitchen playing music. We’d totally improvise for as long as our kitchen timer went on, and then we’d have tapes n tapes of material after that. I had the, ahem, fantastic idea of calling us Tapes 'n Tapes, and then of course I hated the name, but it kind of stuck.” Naming befuddlement runs in the family - the band's album, 'The Loon', named after a deli round the corner from Tapes' makeshift office has been interpreted as a reference to their eccentric style, and also as a patriotic statement about the official bird of their homestate, Minnesota. "We didn't think of that till people started reviewing it," says Erik. "Now it just feels like we're doing our civic duty."
The boys seem very relaxed about their whistlestop British tour, their first jaunt overseas as a band, and are looking forward to coming back in the summer for a prestigious opening slot on the Carling stage at this years Reading and Leeds festivals. "It's just awesome to be over here," says Josh. "We want to come back next year for Glastonbury." Festivals shouldn't be a problem for the frontman, Josh is already a bit of an Anglophile, although memories of his last experience of a British festival will weigh heavy on his mind when he runs the gauntlet at Reading this year. "I went to (legendarily riot strewn) Leeds Festival when Guns 'n Roses played. It was disgusting. We slept through most of the riot, but when we got up everything was totally fucked up. We had to get out of there – it was like Sodomon and Gomorrah." This time, however, they won't be camping with the great unwashed, and it'll be interesting to see what the punks and emo kids think of them, especially because they'll be facing down the rumbling Mastodon on the next stage. Truth is, with such a hipper-than-thou rep, there’s every chance Tapes n Tapes could turn out to be a cold and aloof live experience, despite their good-humouredness backstage. Luckily, nothing could be further from the truth. At their first ever British show, they take to the stage at a full-capacity Metro club crammed with A&R types and journos and proceed to gamely tear the roof off the place.
With a set down pat thanks to extensive touring across America, the brothers Tapes whip through almost every song on the album, before ending on a full-on Guns 'n Roses style rock breakdown on '10 Gallon Ascots.' Grier, a relaxed and lugubrious figure backstage turns into a ball of nervous tension on stage, screaming his little lungs out as bassist Erick throws shapes in the corner and Matt flits from xylophone to tuba and ends up leaping about the stage, crashing Jeremy’s cymbals with a tambourine. Songs that, on record sound sparse and willfully obtuse are much more muscular and full-bodied on stage. To take nothing away from the production of the album, which is sparky and clear, tonight, 'Cowbell,' 'Insistor' and 'The Illiad' pulse with raw, punky energy, and the band throw away any accusations of seriousness or pretentiousness by joking with the audience and humbly telling the crowd they are, you guessed it, "Awesome."
There are moments of beauty too. Set, and album highlight 'Omaha' throbs with longing and distance, and would be enough to reduce Gigwise to tears, if it wasn’t for the two middle-aged idiots in front of us who decided it was a brilliant time to have a shouted conversation about an obscure Neutral Milk Hotel album during the quiet bits. Anyway, 'Just Drums,' which sounds like the Strokes back when they were cool soon shuts them up, and has the rest of the crowd bouncing along like demented idiots, completely forgetting the fact that half of them have been sent here to review them. Critical acclaim now seems to follow the band wherever they go, but it didn't stop the band indulging in some guerrilla music journalism of their own when they released their debut EP. “When we first started out,” Josh giggles before going onstage, “we made up a fake reviewer and a fake newspaper and put a quote on our demos from the ‘London Villager.’ If you look closely on our website there's just a whole tissue of lies. Like, we had a reporter come up to us in Boston saying 'I heard that live recording you did from the Millenium dome,' which had been me sticking loads of reverb on a demo and saying it was live. We kinda had to stop lying after that.” By the looks of things, Minneapolis’ favourite new sons almost certainly won't need that type of shameless self-publicity in the future...
