Blame it on the blogs. Blame it on the fickle keyboard elitists who promised us that Tapes 'n Tapes was the second coming of Pavement, the perfectly refined seed of Frank Black and Kim Deal, the revolution that would reclaim the Minneapolis post-punk high ground long abandoned by the Replacements.
They lied, and now they know it.
If Tapes' debut, "The Loon," merely suspended the flow of MySpace-induced propaganda, then "Walk It Off" threatens to bury this band under a pile of message board fodder and neglected bandwidth.
"Anvil," "Say Back Something" and "Time of Songs" shoot a needle through the expectations bubble with a big dose of hipster-by-numbers shoegaze laziness. "Conquest" reproduces "Doolittle" guitar chime, but lacks the Pixies' jittery electricity.
While these songs might not reach mainstream FM, they're bound to get some love from Starbucks radio. Low-key, tuneful and devoid of any semblance of attention-grabbing ability, half of "Walk" crawls along with the same looped white-noise resonance that contemplative latte enthusiasts impassively soak up for hours on end.
Elsewhere, the band's self-conscious drum 'n' bass showmanship on opener "Le Ruse" and particularly "Hang Them All" portends a coming era in which indie's Joy Division fetish collectively lulls the music community into a rhythm-induced coma.
Some groups possess the melodic pedigree to thrive on bass lines and choppy percussion, but Tapes isn't one of them.
Maybe the propulsive onslaught of the eighth track benefits from the building lethargy that precedes it. Or maybe "Blunt" is just a really great song. Tight and explosive, it's the kind of three minutes that made these guys such Pitchfork darlings in the first place. Best case scenario, though, it's a time-buying stop gap. Worst case, it's a last grasp at relevance.
In the end, Web hype resembles the data on a crashed hard drive, so "Walk It Off" sounds like the kind of momentum-squashing effort that could forever banish Tapes 'n Tapes into the cyberspace ether, or worse, back to Minnesota.
