Review

Indie guitar blog darlings go big on sophomore LP.
Given Tapes 'n Tapes' border-state location, it's hardly surprising that their second album skews slightly toward Canadian-style complexity [see: Broken Social Scene, et al.] — as did 2006's The Loon. But the Minneapolitan quartet mostly prize efficiency, and would surely rather eat flourescent tubes than clutter frontman Josh Grier's ruminations with fiddle filigree or excessive processing. Even storied Flaming Lips producer and density enthusiast David Fridmann plays by his clients' rules — clarity is Walk It Off's most prominent trait.

Not that the album lacks spectacle: On indie rock cha-cha "Conquest," Jeremy Hanson's bass drum and tom-toms sound bigger than Lake Superior, while Grier's vocals suggests he's singing from the water tower James Cagney ascended at the end of White Heat (especially during the part when he triumphantly barks "hide your women" again and again). Double-time apprehension ballad "Say Back Something" offers identical tactics, only backwards, with Hanson under towels and Grier's "I'm so scared'"s issuing from the deep end of a quickly-filling pool. And it's the guitarist, multi-instrumentalist Matt Kretzmann and bassist Erik Applewick's newfound yen for conjuring harmonic maelstroms — as on psychedelic quickie "Blunt" and combat boogie "The Dirty Dirty" — that'll have fans arguing Walk It Off and The Loon's relative merits for years.