The brainchild of artist/musician/quintessential California dude Matt Adams, alongside a rotating cast of two dozen or so collaborators, The Blank Tapes execute lo-fi garage-pop with a combination of grit and earnestness that all too often goes missing from the genre. Adams' latest, Hwy. 9, is a 40-track behemoth roughly a decade in the making, recorded (per his usual) to 8-track cassette in living rooms, basements, and closets throughout Oakland, S.F., and L.A. What began as a concept album to accompany a comic storybook (one he hopefully still makes someday) is now a psychedelic soundtrack to a cartoony, coastal existence, with songs for the fog en route to Santa Cruz, the bleached-out beaches of Orange County, and everything in between.