by Conor Lochrie (@conornoconnor)
Tape Deck Mountain was started by Travis Trevisan in 2008 and it’s been a long and conflicted journey to this point, their new album True Deceiver. The project passed through four cities and several different bandmates but finally appears to be approaching settlement of some kind. Landing in Nashville, this and their previous album, 2018’s Echo Chamber Blues, featured the same rhythm section on back-to-back albums for the first time: Andy Gregg (drums) and Sully Kincaid (bass), as well as the addition of a second guitar player for the first time in Greg Harp.
It’s why the wall of sound that Tape Deck Mountain creates on True Deceiver is so subsuming and shattering, enhanced by increased guitar power and stronger understanding within the band. As overwhelming emotion is pummeled through the heaving and noisy instrumentation and densely bleak atmosphere, a simmering sense of frustration emerges, always boiling underneath, always threatening to rise to the surface. A song like “Apocrypha” is intensely dark while “Pyramid” propels forward with momentous and mountainous rage.
When listening to the album, two meanings for the title True Deceiver present themselves. Trevisan is concerned with our over reliance on technology, a fraught subject equal to the heaviness of his band’s sound that surrounds it, tackling it most vigorously in the opening two tracks. “Screen Savior” - note the wry pun - questions our digital dependence underneath a grunge kick. Then follows “NOMO,” short for nomophobia, which is a term used to describe when people have a fear of being detached from mobile phone connectivity (surely a growing malade alongside its sister FOMO in the last decade). Even consider the album cover: a giant astronaut figure lies dormant on a Mars-like planet, a lone person gazing upon it, either in admiration or revile. The much-heralded colonization of Mars is both a result of our destruction of our own planet by increased technology and our desire to advance technology itself by exploring outer space. True Deceiver: we are being deceived by the perceived qualities of our own modern world, Trevisan seems to say.
The other meaning of the term comes through just what genre the band could be labeled under. “Since 2009, Tape Deck Mountain has been making albums that both celebrate and subvert the “shoegaze” tag,” reads the liner notes to the album. The Nashville Scene even crowned them Best Shoegazers in their 2018 Best of Nashville issue. Yet they’ve always had a conflicted relationship with the genre, playing with its structure and its formula. On this album, much of it boasts nods to other genres. “Hush” sounds like droning post-hardcore, inclusive of shaking screams near its conclusion; the darkly melodic “Instruments of Keeping Time” feels almost alt-metal; the title track closes the album with a twinklier math rock rhythm. Although there remain portions of the genre - Loveless-esque guitars in “NOMO,” hissing feedback and reverb elsewhere - much of the instrumentation is too progressive, many of the vocals too crisp to belong to shoegaze. True Deceiver: perhaps Tape Deck Mountain have been deceiving us all along that they were ever a shoegaze band, Trevisan seems to say.
Perhaps, then, it would be better to appreciate this album outside any restrictive boundaries, just as Tape Deck Mountain’s weighty rhythm section and sonic exploration always feels like it’s journeying somewhere, always spacey and moodily hazy. Perhaps it’s enough to just acknowledge the skill and precision of the four career musicians who can still portray and provoke such complex rock.