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Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band

WHO: Wait, so the guitarist and percussionist are the legal guardians of the tweenage drummer? Yep, and the Seattle group’s music is equally unorthodox. Check how “Dull Reason” and “Anchors Dropped” ingeniously whipsaw between tense indie raving and harmony-rich pastoralia. LATEST: Weepy EP ( self-released) FOR FANS OF: The Fiery Furnaces, Animal Collective

Tapeheads

Department of Eagles

WHO: Given that DOE is three-fourths of Grizzly Bear, In Ear Park’s gonzo choirboy vocals and serpentine song structures are pleasantly predictable. But twists come courtesy of stardust string arrangements and sepia-toned sonic surprises. Enjoy the Brooklyn birdmen with a salvia-garnished gin rickey. LATEST: In Ear Park (4AD) FOR FANS OF: Fleet Foxes, Joanna Newsom

Meet the cult of cassette fetishists

When a rare cassette tape turned up on eBay two years ago, Leslaw Skrzypek vowed it would be his at any price. After a furious round of bidding, Skrzypek beat back his rivals with an offer just over $100. His prize was not a coveted Grateful Dead bootleg or a never-released Radiohead demo, but a blank tape: a sealed TDK SAX from 1986.

“This collector in Poland told me you never regret the price you pay for a tape, but you always regret the tape you don’t buy,” says Skrzypek, a Tampa math professor who has amassed 1,000 old blank tapes—mainly TDKs—that he keeps sorted by year in their original shrink-wrap.

Vintage blank-tape collecting has exploded in recent years as nostalgia for the format increases and original tapes grow scarce. Websites like tapedeck.org and c- 90.org feature page after page of close-ups of cassettes: tape porn. The most sought-after cassettes, which originally retailed for a couple of dollars, now sell for $50, $100, or even nearly $250, in the case of one extremely rare Yamaha MR, which was

originally sold with a particular cassette deck. Audiophiles love the Maxell Metal Vertex, a high-end cassette perfect for producing crisp home recordings. Design geeks swoon for the retro styling of the TEAC Cobalt 52, which has golden reels that resemble rims on an Escalade. Others, like Skrzypek, track down every tape of a particular brand and rarely use them for recording. “At the prices these tapes are going for,” he says, “how could I afford to record on them?”

Joel “Dr. Bo” Eidbo, a patholo-gist from Meadville, Pennsylvania, has been collecting for more than a decade. At one point, he had as many as 15,000 tapes; now he supplies collectors through his eBay auctions. “I was always a big fan o f stereo equipment,” says

Joel Eidbo keeps his vast collection in a special room in his basement (top).

Eidbo, who also used to collect tape decks and reel-to-reel recorders. What he finds most fascinating about cassettes is how “companies took a mediocre technology and turned it into something that had craftsmanship and artisanship.”

Darrel Lambert, an Austin, Texas police officer who scours Texas thrift stores for tapes that look “like something that Kraftwerk would record on,” was shocked to discover other people shared his hobby. “It’s like collecting crumpled receipts and finding out there is a crumpled-receipt-collecting group out there,” he says.

But no one’s more amazed by the phenomenon than

employees at audio companies. “I can understand that nostalgia connection to the past,” says Tony Mercado, marketing development manager for Kenwood U.S.A. “But I’m kind of shocked that people are paying that kind of money for cassettes.” JUSTIN JOUVENAL

The Gaslight Anthem WHO: A New Jersey band that plays glistening, guitar-heavy songs about girls, cars, and rock’n’roll? Gaslight aren’t doing themselves any easy favors, but singer Brian Fallon’s heartfelt howl and his fellow Bosslings’ yearning roots-punk mark this quartet as inheritors, not imitators. LATES T: The ’ 59 Sound (SideOneDummy) FOR FANS OF: Ted Leo, Against Me!

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Illa J WHO: It’s not just the name that’s familiar; this 22-year-old Detroit MC’s debut joint is brimming with bittersweet rhymes, warmly burbling keyboard lines, and smooth soul beats, just like the kind his late big brother, hip-hop production genius J Dilla, used to make. LATEST: Yancey Boys (Delicious Vinyl) FOR FANS OF: The Roots, Lupe Fiasco