The Loon by Tapes 'n Tapes

The Loon, the debut album from Minneapolis indie rockers Tapes 'n Tapes, first surfaced on October 28, 2005, a homemade CD put out through the band's own Ibid Records. The group had come together at Carleton College in the winter of 2003, and it plays like a college band with a record collection worth raiding: critics heard the Pixies and Pavement all over it, lumped them in with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and Pitchfork handed it a Best New Music tag.

XL Recordings picked it up for a UK release on July 24, 2006, on CD and vinyl, and put out "Insistor" and "Cowbell" as singles that year, two jittery, lurching blasts of guitar that twitch between a shout and a shrug. The songs got around, too: "Insistor" landed on the Major League Baseball 2K7 soundtrack, and closer "Jakov's Suite" turned up in a Nissan commercial late in 2006.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.