After Tapes ‘n Tapes amassed a bunch of blog buzz back with their last album, they signed to XL and toured all over the place. Now the tunefully gritty Minneapolis quartet is readying Walk It Off for an April 8th release, and frontman and sushi aficionado Josh Grier took a break from that to discuss eating his way through Japan on tour.

“We were all really excited when we found out that we were going to Japan because we had heard stories about how much crazier Japanese food is there than in the U.S.,” Grier says. “There were a few things that looked and tasted familiar, but there were more that didn’t.”

Grier is no stranger to bizarre bites (he ate kangaroo in Australia), but even he needed a few drinks to handle some of the cuisine. “The craziest thing I ate was Natto (ed note: check the less-than-appetizing image), which is fermented soybeans (and super healthy),” he recalls. “It has a very intense smell and taste and sticky texture, and I think I was the only one in the band who tried it—after a lot of beer and sake.”

Luckily, some of the cuisine didn’t require Grier’s inebriation, like the raw beef dish shabu shabu. “There was a pot of boiling water or broth in the middle of the table and we took razor thin slices of raw beef and dipped in the pot for a few seconds,” he explains. “After a seemingly endless supply of beef, noodles and vegetables were added to the broth, we ate it as soup.” The singer compared the experience to the scene in Lost in Translation where Bill Murray’s character eats the beef dish with Scarlett Johansson, and after Grier’s assessment of the meal, perhaps Murray would have had more success hawking shabu shabu than Suntory.

More Tapes ‘n Tapes can be heard on their MySpace page.