parlando

the tapes

Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.

It's a truism of mine that there is more good music coming out now than I can ever hear; that the condition of being an active enthusiast of more than a couple genres is the condition of falling further behind forever.

In the last couple years it's been worse because I haven't been able to afford to make even a token gesture at keeping up; I have kept up with the things I already know, and occasionally run into something new that excites me (Erase Errata, Arctic Monkeys). Mostly, though, I've been exploring the past, and since there are several genres I only began listening to in adulthood, the holes in my past knowledge are immense.

What the internet has taught me is that they are vaster holes than I had thought: that even in rock and pop of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which I know as well as I know anything, there are great things I never heard and never heard of. The condition of forever falling behind extends into the past, too.

(If I may polemically digress for a moment: This is one of the things that the internet has been great for, and downloading music in particular has been a cultural boon. We now have the ability to resurrect lost music and find it an audience through enthusiasm and word of mouth and downloading that simply did not exist before. Long-forgotten songwriters like Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs have an audience now, through this network, that they never approached while they were recording; Bunyan has even come out of her nearly forty-year retirement to record again, and damned well. File sharing isn't killing music, it's saving it.)

I was uncomfortably aware, back when I wanted to know everything about the things that I liked, that I knew excellent bands in Seattle in the 1976-1984 period that never made an impact outside of Seattle (Red Dress, the U-Men, Three Swimmers, the Blackouts, the Little Bears from Bangkok, Student Nurse, others I can't remember), and this almost certainly meant there were similar scenes of excellent bands in other cities that I would never ever know about. Though I harbor no illusions of completeness anymore, the itch to find out about these bands when I could stuck with me, and when someone uploads to usenet bands from that period I have never heard of, I often check them out, and I've found some pleasant surprises that way (and a lot of stuff that deserved to disappear, of course).

So a couple days ago, someone uploaded three albums by some band called the Tapes. I looked them up on the net, and found no information except a discography which gave the dates of the albums: 1978, 1980, 1981. One of the albums was on Passport, a somewhat adventurous imprint of the period that had put out the Slow Children albums, a favorite obscurity of mine. This was promising. I downloaded a track, started it up, and within a few bars my attention was caught, and in thirty seconds I was excited. Could that excitement hold up over a whole album? It did; and even held up over all three. I had stumbled -- through the grace of some anonymous enthusiast -- upon a superb new wave band I had never heard of. Yet when I looked for more information, I found nothing -- this wasn't something I ought to have known about and overlooked, this was a band that appeared to have inspired no lasting comment at all. Eventually I was able to determine that they were Dutch (though singing in English), but even from Dutch sites I wasn't able to find out the names of the musicians.

I have neglected to describe the music. It is new wave of its period: herky-jerky rhythms, jaggedy guitars and melodic bubbly basslines and precise drumming, before new wave got dominated by synths. Somewhat yelpy vocals, not a lot of held notes in any of the instruments, empty space between notes, stops and starts, a lot of precise and oddball patterns, machine-like but goofy. It sounds to me clearly influenced by early Talking Heads, with a little Tin Huey thrown in. It's from the end of art-punk that doesn't take itself too seriously. It's ear-catching, and constantly surprising with the little turns it takes, the way it doesn't settle for the obvious changes and choices. Actually, I just realized it sounds an awful lot like the first two XTC albums.

Here are two songs by the Tapes:

from 1980's Party, "(I Fall) Head First"

from 1981's On a Clear Day, "Good Riddance"

Can anyone tell me anything more about these guys?

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