Tonight Tapes ‘N Tapes is playing a sold-out show at the Echo in Los Angeles. It reminds the Minneapolis band’s singer Josh Grier of the last time his band ventured to the Left Coast.
“It was 2 1/2 years ago,” Grier said from Dallas earlier this week. “We did a monthlong West Coast tour, and it was way more piecemeal than this one. We were playing shows wherever we could, just scraping by.”
What a difference 2 1/2 years makes. Back then, Tapes ‘N Tapes were calling venues on the go, explaining their funny name and exuberant sound to club owners and promoters, some of whom were willing to take a chance on them.
Today Tapes ‘N Tapes is one of the hottest indie rock buzzbands of 2006, and the clubs the band is playing – including the Larimer Lounge, where it headlines Thursday – are often selling out with fans elated by the quartet’s irresistibly rollicking rock goodness.
“All the shows have been really well-attended,” Grier said. “We sold out both Nashville and Atlanta, and I’ve never been to either of those places in my life. To have people there going crazy and having fun in a town you’ve never been in before, a town you have no expectations for, is really amazing.”
People react to quality music, and in indie rock this equates to a phenomenon known as The Sold-Out Rock Clubs. Think about Arcade Fire at the Larimer Lounge, Louis XIV at the Hi-Dive or Franz Ferdinand at the Bluebird: There’s a common rush of energy dominating those sweaty, shoulder-to-shoulder environs.
It’s excitement, yes, but even more so it’s joy.
Tapes ‘N Tapes sold more than 10,000 copies of its debut record “The Loon” before signing with XL, the respected indie label. It wasn’t long before Tapes ‘N Tapes was being compared to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Besides the fact that both bands are heavily influenced by David Byrne and his Talking Heads, both bands were stalwart DIYers.
But Grier and company found that the paper-shuffling needed to keep a small business going interfered with the playing – especially when said business is a band with a burgeoning fan base.
“It was very exciting that it was happening, but at the same time it was like, ‘Oh God, filling orders for eight hours a day is tough,”‘ he said. “And so it made sense for us to go with a label and let them handle the business side of things so we can do the musical side of things.”
“The Loon” will be re-released July 25, and the band will make another sweep of the country, returning to Denver Aug. 2 to open for The Futureheads at the Bluebird. When XL signed the band, the record was removed from iTunes – bringing to a close a bizarre segment in the life of “The Loon.” When the band finally got it on iTunes as an independent, an ordeal in itself, the record was labeled with an explicit content warning, regardless of the fact that it contains nary a dirty word.
“We’re not even sure how it happened,” Grier said. “I swear like a sailor all the time, but in music, I don’t know that it’s necessary. There are a lot of different ways of describing things.
“And the lyrics, I don’t want them to be a distraction from the music. In general, explicit content is in its nature distracting. For me, I hear music first, and then the lyrics come second after I’ve listened to it for a while.”
He points to another pretty fair songwriter.
“If you’re an amazing lyricist – somebody like Bob Dylan, whose lyrics are amazing, and if he wrote terrible lyrics, he wouldn’t have had nearly the impact he had. But I don’t consider myself a brilliant lyricist.”
Grier grew up in Eugene, Ore., but moved to the land o’ lakes and Dylan – that would be Minnesota – for college at Carleton College, a prestigious private liberal arts school where he escaped the West and East Coast-ruts of his high school classmates.
“The Midwest has its own way of going about doing things,” said Grier. “And it’s also hard to explain. When you say that people are reserved, it comes off funny. You can’t really describe how different parts of the country are. They just are.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
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Tapes ‘N Tapes
INDIE ROCK|Larimer Lounge, 2721 Larimer St.; 9 p.m. Thursday with Figurines and Cold War Kids|$10|larimerlounge.com, bigmarkstickets.com
