More or less, everything's a battlefield - the place you stand in, the place where you stood - and the trend for more of that is skyrocketing it appears. Everyone's pissy, overworked, and stressed, sending out nasty vibrations and stagnant karma that's going to come back and nip many in the bud.
People are harder to deal with and being wrapped up in a casing of self and non-food, but everything else gluttony turns conversation, operating and resting into a considerable challenge. The feelings that brew up from the cracks - when it all gets pressurized - is the angle that Josh Grier, the lead singer and songwriter for Minneapolis band Tapes 'n Tapes draws from on the young group's sophomore release Walk It Off, a pounding and dominant-voiced album that isn't the easy dancer like The Loon from 2006 was. Grier chooses to illustrate his points with imagery that takes us back to a place we've never been - when Genghis Khan was running the Mongol Empire and even more so when General William Tecumsuh Sherman ordered the evacuation and burning of the city of Atlanta during the American Civil War. The battle has been waged for rightness all over Walk It Off--alternate titles could be "Suck It Up" or "Rub Some Dirt On It" - with Grier walking alone "through miles and miles of bones" and imploring people to "hide your women" as if the pillagers were storming into the city with wooden brooms lit afire, using as lanterns in the dead of the night and sneering with leery expressions.
Whether the album is a direct reaction to the world that he sees or an exaggerated presentation of the life the band's led in its two blowing up years, Walk It Off is a record that doesn't offer impunity to any of the ills as they see it. "Hang Them All" is a stellar, crunching ode to this exact thought that the guilty must be tried, found guilty and dealt with in an appropriate manner. The streets of nearly all of the songs on the record run red with blood, hammering down on the thumbs that hang off ledges for dear life. It's an album that's smoking out the impure hearts and Tapes 'n Tapes are standing at the pulpit, with the fiery flames popping all around them, but not blackening them up, singeing their leg hairs or melting their soles/souls.