★☆☆☆☆
After 17 years as guitarist and producer with Death Cab For Cutie, Chris Walla announced he was leaving the band last year.
Tape Loops is his first solo album since then: five tracks of wholly instrumental mood music. I’m not sure exactly what the mood is but it’s somewhere between chill and bored. ‘Chored’. Or ‘bill’.
This is music made for a slightly miserable yoga session (aren’t they all?) or the bit in a gritty cop drama where the main detective looks into a murky river, remembers his dead girlfriend and cries a bit. The instrumentation is mainly piano and piano-sounding things, there’s never any sign of a beat, and towards the end there are some bass notes and what’s probably a guitar. That’s the exciting bit.
Some of the songs are long. Some are a bit longer. Which is about all that differentiates them. That and their titles, which are mostly dull, like ‘Goodbye’ and ‘Introductions’. Maybe Walla’s reacting against a lifetime stuck in a band, a cog in the corporate music machine, with all the demands of timely releases and radio-friendly hits that brings.
Maybe Tape Loops’ disregard for the audience is the whole purpose. Which is great for Walla, but what about us?
