Primer: Tortoise Part 3- TNT

While there's no hard and fast rule or set of rules about what makes a great album cover, one kind of cover always appeals to me: the ambiguous one. I don't mean abstract or minimalist. In fact, it's hard for me to say precisely what I mean because by its very nature the ambiguous album cover doesn't fit into a category. Rather, I like to explain it as the kind of record cover that captures your imagination but provides no explanation or context for the music contained therein. Tortoise's TNT is a cover that will stick me for the rest of my life. It's a simple, tossed off doodle done by a band member during the recording sessions, but with its "Casper-the-Friendly-Ghost-with-lazy-eyes-and-weird-stink-line-breath" character offering both the band's name and album title, I was endlessly intrigued with the album before even listening to it all those years ago.

I've probably written about this before in another context, but there's something to be said for the purity of blind musical discovery. Though nowadays if there's reviews of an album out before I hear it, I can't stop myself from reading them, I used to be able to arrive at various bands without knowing precisely what I was in for. I think back to the first phase of my love affair with music, when I pawed through my parents' record collection, picking out ones with covers that caught my eye or had band names that sounded familiar. I think about the sadly few times I've done this since while at my local record store, picking an album blindly on the way it looks, the way the name kind-of-rings-a-bell, the names of the songs, etc.

The point I'm too-slowly getting to is that Tortoise are a band who always manage to release albums that give me that same sense of blind musical discovery. Even though I know who the members are, at the same time, I don't. Not really. I know they're all involved in various other bands and that they're from Chicago, but even after seeing them in various interviews and live clips on YouTube, I'm still no closer to knowing them. And that's for the best, because with a band like Tortoise, their motivations, personal demons, love lives, and biographies don't matter. I suppose a good deal of this has to do with their music being entirely instrumental, but even their song titles, album titles, and album covers are pretty ambiguous. Hell, even the name of the band is. The first time I listened to TNT, I wasn't even sure if I was listening to the album "TNT" by a band called "Tortoise", or the album "Tortoise" by a band called "TNT."

TNT, then. This album is the center point around which Tortoise's entire discography revolves, being a minor turning point for the band both personnel and sound-wise. TNT was recorded over the course of a year, covering the period between the end of the touring for Millions Now Living Will Never Die and finishing up with the departure of David Pajo from the band. Interesting, then, how little Pajo I've detected on the album over the years. Maybe I associate him too much with the sound of Slint, but TNT very obviously belongs to newly recruited guitarist Jeff Parker, who comes from a jazz background. This isn't to say that TNT is a jazz album, but it definitely has a sound that edges closer to guitar-based jazz (think Pat Metheny, but not as Easy Listening as some of you might foolishly think this implies) than previous albums. Oddly, there's also a more pronounced electronic influence, especially on 'The Equator', though this is much more obvious on Standards. In short, TNT is a transitional album, and like most transitional albums, it brushes up against greatness but ultimately misses 'classic' status.

The problem--and I hesitate to use that word, because I do like TNT--is that this album is too long. That may seem like a positive to some people, because in this age of endless playlists and track skipping, too much of a favorite band is never too much. But, as a singular, contained piece of music, TNT is too unwieldly to sit down and listen to. At 64 minutes in length, it's two tracks too long. I usually get lost somewhere in the middle of it, and while I really enjoy albums that I can get lost inside of and re-connect with later when my attention wanders back, it's also the hallmark of an album that isn't engaging all the way through. Tortoise may be one of my favorite bands, but the kind of criticisms that are leveled at them by haters--they're boring, noodle-y, or even too 'safe'--speak to their ability to constantly fit inside the ambient music ideal that Brian Eno set out. That is to say, music that functions just as well as being the 'wallpaper' of a room as it does the center of a listener's attention. This is a nice way of saying that sometimes I get bored of TNT halfway through and start to fall asleep, or I get up to do something else while it's still playing. Like, take a leak, read a book, figure out what I'm going to eat for dinner, etc.

So, then, what to change about TNT to make it better?? I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with its overall sound, so that's not it. After all, you're very likely to love a good deal of this album. 'TNT' is a fantastic opener, with a great jazzy drums-and-horn section vibe to it; 'Ten-Day Interval' is a hypnotic showcase for the band's trademark vibes/marimbas; 'Almost Always Is Nearly Enough' sounds like an IDM remix of a Tortoise song without the need for any remixing because it already sounds that way. However, the album needs to be edited down somewhere, and were I to choose the requisite two tracks to trim this album down to get it into fighting shape, I would have to prune 'Four-Day Interval' and the unwieldly titled 'In Sarah, Mencken, Christ And Beethoven There Were Women', a combined 12-or-so minutes of music; the former for being a plodding, minimalist revision of the vibe/marimbas theme from 'Ten-Day Interval' and the latter for being seven minutes long with not nearly enough development. Keep in mind these aren't bad songs, per se, but they are totally unnecessary. They are guilty of making the middle of album so...not "boring", but...close. I'm almost positive that somewhere out there, some Tortoise fans are gnashing their teeth (or their beaks...?? tortoises have beaks, not teeth, right??) and saying that those two songs are among their favorites, but so it goes.

TNT may be the reason that I got into Tortoise, but it's probably my second to least favorite of their's. Yes, it ultimately comes down to personal taste, but TNT has always felt like a 'bogged down' album to me. It took a year to record, the band had six members at the time, and it's too long. While it doesn't have the "trying too hard" vibe that my least favorite Tortoise album does (that would be It's All Around You), and while it also is still pretty great, it's just not essential in my book.