Primer: Tortoise Part 5- It's All Around You

It only happens from time to time, but every once in awhile, you get the impression that a band is trying too hard. For whatever reason--trying to distance themselves from their past, trying to move their art forward, trying to rip it all up and start from scratch, trying to be something they're not--listening to an album of their's gives you the feeling that they're putting way too much thought and effort into an ultimately fruitless pursuit. It's as if the band is fighting their instincts and overthinking their approach when they don't have to.

On It's All Around You, Tortoise give off the impression that they're trying too hard. Which is paradoxical, because this is their least challenging and interesting album. You'd think one would be more apt to say they're trying too hard about the predecessor, Standards, which added new wrinkles to the band's sound and vision. But, no. It's All Around You is trying too hard in one very dire way: it's trying to sound like Tortoise, and ends up emphasizing most of their worst traits in the process.

For starters, there's the packaging. I normally don't bring this up in reviews, because who really cares, but...well, I own It's All Around You in the digipak format. The band did that clever/un-clever thing of making both the front and back of the CD the 'covers', so you aren't sure which one the true cover is. Moreover, the cover art is ridiculous nature scene garbage, the kind of crap you would see stillshots of on a digital cable music channel for 'easy listening.' At the same time, I don't get what the band are trying to say with the little story that's printed in the booklet about a girl picking strawberries. Personally, I take it as a metaphor for the album itself: "I know what I do not want", the girl says, "and I will not be happy with it."

On second thought, maybe it's not a metaphor so much as a direct summation of my feelings.

See, It's All Around You is Tortoise's worst album. It marks the first time I really thought Tortoise were just repeating themselves, but repeating themselves in worse ways. The production and playing are immaculate to a disappointing degree. I mean, I love Steely Dan as much as the next guy, but It's All Around You sounds mathematically precise, clinical, and energy-less when it shouldn't. The album's most interesting sequence--where the ponderous, searching 'Unknown', slowly unraveling like a good improvisation, suddenly screams into the noisy, drum heavy 'Dot/Eyes'--feels coldly calculated and without any balls. Allow me to explain: the Velvet Underground's noisy tendencies, that was 'having balls.' They sounded animalistic and human when they were cranking the volume and shoving their guitars at their amplifiers. Most modern noise/improv, by contrast, sounds 'without balls', because it's so intellectual and theoretically driven. Half of the time, you get the feeling like it's more a science or math experiment and not an attempt to create music and/or sonic 'art.'

There's no sense of danger, experimentation, or chance anywhere on this album. Too often it clings to elements of the past, mirrored in personality-less ways. 'On The Chin' sounds like a lost b-side that was re-recorded for the album, with a typically Tortoise slow moving rhythm, arbitrary use of vibes/marimbas, and the same guitar texture you've heard on pretty much every Tortoise album since TNT. Now, there is something to be said for having a distinctive sound, but if you just keep repeating yourself, that value is eventually gone. 'Five Too Many' assumes you'll stick around to listen to the aimless, noodling guitar "solo" that takes up most of its runtime, despite the fact that you've tired of this kind of anti-solo noodling long since if you've listened to any Tortoise album before. And where their sudden stops and just-as-sudden return to/re-working of a theme used to seem interesting and unique, now it just seem rote and boring--witness 'Salt The Skies', which is perhaps the best summation of this problem, and with this album in general. It starts out with a winding, circular ascent, then some rising tension via volume/more instruments and an increase in pace, then a sudden release of said tension in a crescendo, and finally a return to the original theme. As I said, this kind of thing used to be stunning, but now it's just...obvious.

It's been four years since Tortoise released anything new (I don't count their collaboration with Bonnie 'Prince' Billy), and I would like to think it had something to do with the warmed over music of It's All Around You, which more and more sounds like a stopgap, standing-still album. Whatever Tortoise might have in store for a future release, I hope they learned some valuable lessons from this album and the reception it received. It's not terrible, but only because it plays it too safe to be terrible. Playing it safe isn't automatically damning, but when a band has four other albums that are perfectly serviceab--ok, no, they're outright better, you kind of have to wonder what the point of a boring, unchallenging fifth album is. Unless you really, really love Tortoise, you can easily skip this one.