The Albums That Matter: The Loon

Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE. I'm not doing the alphabetical thing this week. Instead, I'm boring your socks off by writing about four random albums. Let's burn this shit to the ground.

The Loon

Tapes 'n Tapes

2005

Tapes 'n Tapes exist now as a footnote, and that kind of pisses me off.

You see, there was this made up genre back in the mid-'00s called "blog rock." This was around the time that internet websites first started to write about music and becoming the taste-makers of the up-and-coming generation, and the first group of bands that were widely pushed by these blogs because forever associated with the movement.

So now, during a time when music exists everywhere and can be curated by anyone, you can sometimes find people reminiscing about this strange couple of years when blogs held all the power, and how weird that all was. And all these bands are going to be grouped together, even though a lot of them don't sound anything alike, and a lot of them are fucking great and deserve to be remembered for more than being just part of a fictional genre.

Tapes 'n Tapes is one of those bands, and their immortal debut album, The Loon, absolutely deserves recognition. As it stands now, there aren't a whole lot of people reminiscing about those months when The Loon was all the rage, and that's a fucking shame. This band deserves to be fondly remembered as more than a goddamn footnote in some shitty nostalgia piece about whatever the music nerds were pushing at the time.

The Loon is a truly unique album, which makes it weird to me that some blogs take swipes at their supposed lack of originality. I guess you could say they kind of sound like the Pixies? But Tapes 'n Tapes' sound is way tighter than that band's, and, dare I say it, a little quirkier. They do absolutely have that mid-aughts sound of DIY indie mixed with mid-tier venue sell-out aspirations, both with a shakiness that sounds like it was recorded in one room on one recording device, and also loud enough and with enough passion that it's gonna reach the cheap seats.

"Insistor" was the "big hit" back in the day, and rightly so, as it showcases Tapes 'n Tapes at their best. This is balls-to-the-wall indie rock, with a snare drum that won't quit, and a vocal performance that just drips with sweat. I do not blame any blog in 2005 for thinking that this band was destined for greatness based on this song alone, but the rest of The Loon fucking brings it. "Manitoba" plays coy for three minutes before hopping in the driver's seat and pressing the gas. "Crazy Eights" sounds like the boys trying to emulate "Louie Louie" in spirit, if not necessarily in style. "Cowbell" has the most crooked chorus I've ever heard, and it still works.

I could go on, but you get the point. Why should this band be relegated to a context that immediately dismisses them? It just doesn't seem right—this album is just too fucking good.

But that's what blogs do, I suppose. We try to provide a context for the music, even if it's not fair to do so, even if the music is good enough to stand on its own. Tapes 'n Tapes was only known to anyone because some websites decided to hype them up, and then they ceased to exist because those same websites declined to continue carrying the torch. Tapes 'n Tapes lived and died by the blogosphere. I suppose it's important to mention all this in telling their story. I just think they deserve more, is all.

Maybe it's easier for me to say that because I was slightly late to the whole "blog rock" thing. I was blooming as a musiophile around the same year that this album came out, more into the Beatles at that time, because that's who you start with, right? But I was absolutely dipping my toe into the indie rock waters by 2005. I know that I definitely was a fan of blog rock royalty Clap Your Hands Say Yeah by the end of the year—their self-titled debut (one of my favorite albums of all time, for what it's worth) came out about three months prior to The Loon.

I didn't get The Loon until Christmas 2008, so I was very late to the party. My experiencing this album for the first time came with absolutely zero baggage. But in a reverse Spiderman, with no responsibility comes no power; I could not defend The Loon against all naysayers, because they had already left the building.

But here we are, almost fifteen years after the album was released, and I'm still listening to it, still loving it. Call it blog rock if you must, I'd just rather you not use the term in a negative way. This is a blog, after all.

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If this album sounds interesting, try this song: "Just Drums"

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Stray Observations

• All this being said, I never got around to checking out either of the other Tapes 'n Tapes albums. As great as The Loon is, it absolutely sounds like a band striking gold once. Walk It Off and Outside got bad reviews in general, which didn't help, but I guess there is a chance that the critical reception was just blowback for the blog-rock fad being over. This sounds like a job for Record Club.
• Shoutout to the drummer, Jeremy Hanson, for being busy and on-point during every song. I was going to say that he was "underrated," but can a band's drummer be underrated when they have a song called "Just Drums"?
• ALBUM COVER: Couldn't find much about it. There are four neon-colored trees. The same color scheme would show up on their subsequent release, Walk It Off.
• ALBUM TITLE: A loon is a "silly or foolish person." The word is repeated a few times on "Crazy Eights." That's it. No one accused this album of being deep or anything.
• That's gotta be a Herbie Hancock "Watermelon Man" homage on "The Iliad," right?
• According to Wikipedia, each band member has a stage name that is a word from the band name, like, frontman Josh Grier is "Tapes 1," and so on. This is so dumb that it has to have been an inside joke that made it to the Wikipedia page accidentally. It doesn't even make sense—there are three words, and four band members!
• Speaking of the band name, as a member of the Apostrophe Protection Society, I've always been offended that there's only one apostrophe around the n, where there should be two. It's like "rock 'n' roll," the apostrophes take the place of the a and the d.
• Even though the idea of blog rock annoys me, here is a blog rock playlist that I found that just features too many jams not to mention. Menomena! Midlake! I'm from Barcelona! Art Brut! Los Campesinos!!
• If you're looking for a real-time look at blog rock as it was developing, this review of The Loon was a pretty good representation of it.
• I thought about including this in the main article above, but I thought it might become too maudlin. But I looked up what Tapes 'n Tapes are up to these days. I mean, I knew they weren't a band anymore, but I figured it might've been like a Pepper's Ghost situation, where the guys are in other bands, pecking away at making it in the industry. Not so. After the band's hype died down and their third album was met with a collective sigh, the members pretty much just went back to their data entry jobs in the real world. That bums me out to no end.
• However! Wildly, Tapes 'n Tapes had a reunion show very recently. Last fall, they all got together in Minneapolis to play the old tunes at a brewery. This was also to celebrate the release of that brewery's "TNT Brut IPA." I would've loved to talk about this band in the This Is My Blood column.
• My point being that it's gotta be fucking surreal to have this band that nibbled on some fame at a point in time, to be in a position where people are telling you that you are going to be big, and then fifteen short years later you're playing a brewery gig to promote a beer, and almost no one notices. Tapes 'n Tapes deserves better than this. I am trying to do my part to keep the legacy alive.

NEXT TIME: Turn to Gold by Diarrhea Planet