Tortoise

TNT (Thrill Jockey)
by Nik Rainey

You know the name even if you haven’t quite got their number – Tortoise is the post-rock outfit of choice for effete bastards with lifetime subscriptions to The Wire, posters of Derek Bailey and Iannis Xenakis on their walls, and the tendency to overuse meaningless terms like “post-rock.” (Gulp.) Quite a burden for even a quintet to shoulder, natch – after the cobnobbler cognoscienti soiled their collective Dockers over 1996’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die, this slow-moving aggregate of tectonic shift-workers was left with the implicit challenge: what next? Grow the backbone out a little further or retreat into impenetrable e(c)lectro-arcana to satiate the purists who don’t like music unless you can’t enjoy it? Grow a little larger in their miniscule pond or flop around on the fruitless plains of mass culture for a while? Hit this Jew over the head with a bag of sugar or beat out that rhythm on a drum?

The belated answer (to all but the last: I stole that from an old Firesign Theatre record. I’m getting a little delirious.), as provided by TNT: both and neither. As suits an album so incongruously titled (no incendiary devices or AC/DC covers here, I warn/assure you), Tortoise has followed up their previous magnum opus of needle-hopping, pulsing mechanics with an album that exults in its own contradictions. Effusively lyrical without a single word uttered. Organically configured and artificially sweetened. Pleasant enough to sate the softest-skulled lite jazz head but suitably intricate for the neu-romantik crew. Convolutedly straightforward and definitively elliptical. Acoustic wallpaper that dominates the room. An epic in miniature. (Hey, I’ll keep going if nobody stops me…) Fully-formed, amoebic. Accidental with full intent. That’s Tortoise in a nutshell and you’d best just part with your wages and get this before I slip and do something stupid like try to describe the music or something.