There's probably a fascinating scholarly paper, or at least a feel-good Oprah episode, to be mined about the four smart, quirky Minnesota boys in Tapes 'n Tapes and their internet-fueled success. After hearing Walk It Off, though, I don't care to pursue it. Like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, a band whose career appears equally shackled to the blogosphere's mercurial whims, it's tempting to romanticize TnT's rags-to-riches story. Yet on their follow-up Some Loud Thunder, CYHSY didn't just bristle in the limelight, they actively thumbed their nose at it with risky stylistic forays and stubborn hooks. That ending doesn't fit TnT follow-up Walk It Off, a blissfully directionless album guilty not of audacity but utter innocuity.
Not shying from the CYHSY parallel, the band hired Some Loud Thunder producer Dave Fridmann to breathe life into these song skeletons. Judging by The Loon's prankish ambiguity and touches of psych escapism, Fridmann's mystical touch initially seems like a perfect fit. Unfortunately, these talents don't quite behoove the creative direction TnT veers towards on Walk It Off. Despite Fridmann's track record (Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips, Mogwai, the Delgados), TnT shy away from exploring the canyon-sized depths of sound at their producer's fingertips, instead utilizing his skills for mere decoration-- to the point of nixing the eccentric Pavement-isms of their debut for even more streamlined indie rock.
To say TnT doesn't stir up endorphins in the typical rockist-wired brain would be a lie, but their pleasure principle's less convincing on this textbook sophomore slump. The Loon was upfront about its lack of originality but made sure the listener could at least have fun connecting the dots, noting the Pixies riff here, the Built to Spill jam there. By comparison, *Walk It Off'*s nods to its influences are too broad and underdeveloped to pursue. Sure, you can hear indie signifiers like the "Le Ruse"'s octave riff barrage or the deadpan Beatles-via-Britpop chord changes on "Conquest", but each individual song repeats these tropes too cautiously, worried an impromptu psych vamp or rawk-out outro would shatter its contents.
Amid such simplistic arrangements, a large onus falls on frontman Josh Grier's vocals. An astute Stephen Malkmus scholar, Grier again proves capable of crafting lyrics that, while arcane and often mumbled, manage to evoke strong emotions in small, timely snippets. On "Lines"' epic build, Grier's repeated yelps of "Over line!" work in tandem with an off-kilter lead guitar to construct one of the album's only successful attempts at big-stakes rock. On the Modest Mouse-y ballad "Time of Songs", Grier remains stubbornly unintelligible, though the discernible line "I'll pull you from the bottom/ And I'll leave you on the floor" contains enough emotional weight to make the track stick. Yet despite being the wordsmith behind lines like The Loon's catch phrase "like Harvard Square holds all inane," Grier's not a Morrissey or Bob Dylan; his enigmatic charm doesn't justify the use of instrumentation as mere lyrical scaffolding. Limp tracks like "Say Back Something" or "Anvil" can't subsist on a delicately strummed chord alone, and if you're gonna name a song "George Michael", it's gotta have a better punchline than Vaudeville horns and a half-assed white noise guitar solo.
By nearly all accounts, though, this album could be much worse. Many of the band's best features remain intact, especially their total lack of pretentiousness and austerity. You won't find any symphony-backed lumps of schmaltz or ill-advised stabs at dire social issues, and hey, they even named a very serviceable track here "The Dirty Dirty". However, Walk It Off attempts The Loon's indie patchwork using fewer and larger pieces, causing less-than-stellar ideas and riffs to suddenly become load-bearing pillars for painfully linear three-minute pop songs. As opposed to their ramshackle debut, TnT don't unknowingly stumble upon infectious choruses or head-turning transitions anymore, they contort flimsy songs to contain those elements.
