Great Album Covers: Standards

With the dominance of the CD as the musical format of choice in the 90s and early 00s, I feel like less care and imagination were taken for album covers. Since the CD was the primary format, it made for smaller, often less interesting covers. A band's music videos and magazine interview pictorials became more important to drawing people in than word of mouth or, indeed, an album's cover. So why not just have a visual pun on the album's title as a cover, or a blinged out, fisheye picture of a rapper with a bunch of shiny words in a gold font around him?

Still, during this time there were some bands putting out interesting or noteworthy album covers. Tortoise's in particular I recall always being drawn to, even in CD form. With the exception of It's All Around You, I love every one of the covers they've had for all of their releases, even the cool B&W photo of an accident scene on the A Lazarus Taxon boxset.

Standards is probably my favorite of all, however. As an instrumental band, it's strange to see such a political cover, suggesting perhaps that something wasn't right about our country. Moreover, the chopped up, Photoshopped U.S. flag on the cover hints at the jittery, heavily electronic sound of the music contained within.

Stereolab- Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements

One of the great questions that I obsess over is this: why do so many bands mellow as they age? Think about it. They usually start off with innovative, experimental, or otherwise more 'difficult' music, but sooner or later they begin to smooth over the rough edges or eliminate the off-putting elements of their sound. Understand that I'm not making a value judgment here. Accessibility and mellow-ness aren't bad things in and of themselves. It's just that I often feel that the most interesting and enjoyable music by bands inevitably comes from their earlier eras.

So it goes with Stereolab: compare Neon Beanbag to Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements. Even the titles alone are telling, one a kind of retro-kitsch throwaway and the other a clarion call from the underground, abstract and verbose. Now, I do like their newer work quite a lot (including Neon Beanbag) but I also think they lost something over the past few years. True, Stereolab always had easy listening, lounge, and 60s pop music going on in their music, but it was juxtaposed or spliced with experimental music, noise-pop, and druggy krautrock trance inducing rhythms. Yes, as bands continue to exist they must change, especially if they add or lose members. Yet Stereolab's recent keyboard focused, groovy electro-pop style doesn't do as much for me. As with Tortoise's It's All Around You, I can't help but miss some grit or something unexpected. Or anyway, something that will make it not go down so smooth and easy. As luck would have it, the Pitchfork Institute For Music Nerds recently conducted a double-blind study and discovered that 9 out of 10 Stereolab fans recommend Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements for this or similar purposes.

I love Transient Random-Noise Bursts..., which is a hard thing to admit since I once wrote that Stereolab never released a 100% great album. Turns out I just needed to go further back than Emperor Tomato Ketchup, an album which similarly to Neon Beanbag smoothed over and downplayed the band's experimental side. Ironic that this album would be the group's major label debut in the U.S., since it's impossible to imagine even the most 'cool' and 'hip' of record label executives would allow an artist to put out an album like this. It's not even the obvious inclusion of 'Jenny Ondioline' in its full 18 minutes of glory that I refer to, though that would be the major sticking point. It's primarily the way the band perversely refuse to separate their accessible pop side from their druggy/noisy side. What I'm getting at is, if you stripped away the distorted organs, upped the fidelity a bit, and removed the last half of 'Tone Burst', you'd have the kind of song a record executive might go for. Similarly, 'Pack Yr Romantic Mind' may be one of this album's prettier affairs, but it occasionally gives way to brutal guitar chording akin to an early era Pavement song.
There is something thrilling about an album like this, where a band makes music as if no one is paying attention. As always, Stereolab will have your love on their own terms. 'Golden Ball' gets downright ferocious at its climax, enough so that it would likely shock anyone unfamiliar with the band's noisier side. Appropriately enough, the following track, 'Pause', serves as a (relatively) tranquil respite, showcasing the always-gorgeous vocals of Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen, the former of whom almost always sounds to me like what Nico would've sounded like if she had been into weed and French Leftism instead of heroin and austere German nihilism.

Stereolab recently began an indefinite hiatus, meaning I am far more interested in their next album than I otherwise would be if they had stayed together. I hope their time away from each other reinvigorates them to try new things and experiment with their music again. More easy listening grooves wouldn't be a bad thing if done well, I just wish they would bring back their unfettered palette of sounds and styles, allowing songs to drone on for six minutes or collapse into noisy tone bursts. That's the Stereolab I have come to love and would like to hear again. Until then, there's this album to keep sliding into, like a, uh, neon beanbag. While all of Stereolab's albums are worth checking out, few are as thrilling, interesting, and rewarding as Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Whiskey Pie's Best Of 2009 (Part 2)

(Again, read the badly spellchecked full text below for clarifications of bad sound quality and my mush mouth)

5) I'm Going Away by the Fiery Furnaces: The 2009 releases from Wilco and Yo La Tengo left me feeling pretty meh, so even bands that are normally reliable helped contribute to the general weakness of the year. That said, I ended up loving I'm Going Away by the Fiery Furnaces more than I thought I would. Since this is a release that strips away almost all of the song structure experiments and crazy instrumental workouts of the band's sound, I was initially underwhelmed by the album. But the Furnaces always had the songwriting and melodic hooks beating at the heart of their music, and by focusing on that aspect--and a live-in-the-studio production style--they ended up making one of their best albums. The Friedberger siblings recently issued the digital-only Take Me Round Again, which sees them re-making the songs from this album on their own. In the process they ended up emphasizing that, hey, these are great songs no matter what their form.

4) Beacons Of Ancestorship by Tortoise: "Fun" is not a word I associate with post-rock even if it's obvious the dudes in Mogwai, at least, have a sense of humor. But Tortoise have always given off an intellectual air of clinical studio perfectionism that brings to mind Steely Dan. Yet Beacons Of Ancestorship is the clearest example I heard all year of a band very obviously just trying to have fun with music. Because of this, Beacons may lack the cohesiveness or flow of other Tortoise albums, but it's by far the most fun to listen to and sports a variety of sounds. Call it their "much needed shot in the arm" release if you must, but I never thought I'd be so excited about a Tortoise album after 2005's sleepy, workmanlike It's All Around You.

3) Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear: Yes, I'm not entirely sure how it's pronounced either, but I feel like that was the point. Much like with Dirty Projectors, you have to come up with multi-syllabic phrases to categorize the music of Veckatimest. Indie rock folk pop chamber vocal music? Whatever, the point is, this is an amazing album with a timeless quality to it, bursting with ideas and melodies that never sound obvious or cliche.

2) Merriweather post pavillion by animal collective: Merriweather post pavilion was the best reason to start 2009 just as their recent Fall Be Kind EP is the best reason to let it end. As such, Animal collective felt like they owned the entire year, setting the bar high early for other albums to match and then closing it out in style with a great EP. Every fan seems to have their personal "dude, this is totally the best" Animal Collective album--even if it happens to be Panda Bear's solo release, Person Pitch--yet everyone seems to at least agree that Merriweather is brilliant and rivals their own personal pick. I'm a Sung Tongs man yet there are times while listening to Merriweather when I begin to question my loyalty. It's that good. On a final note, those people who complain that the best songs are at either end of the album--'My Girls' and 'Brothersport'--are neglecting 'Daily Routine' and 'Lion In A Coma', not to mention....well, hell, the whole album is great, so shut up already.

1) Dragonslayer by Sunset Rubdown: Around June of this year, it seemed obvious to me that either Animal Collective or Grizzly bear were going to take this top spot. But then--confession time--I downloaded a torrent of Dragonslayer, and within a couple days I bought every Sunset Rubdown release I could get my hands on. Spencer Krug has always been my favorite member of Wolf Parade, but his contributions to this year's Swan Lake album were sub-par. Furthermore, in retrospect I overrated At Mount zoomer even if I still like it. But I digress. Dragonslayer catapulted Krug to being among my favorite artists. The opening and closing tracks of the album are perfect mood pieces with vibrant imagery, while all the songs are intricate mini-suites that have two or more different pieces that fit internally together, and with the rest of the album as a whole. Furthermore, the subtle or overt nods to Sunset Rubdown's previous album, Random Spirit Lover, are clever and fascinating attempts at further tying together Krug's already inter-connected body of work. I actually had to take Dragonslayer off my iPod because for a long time it was all I wanted to hear. It is a joy to listen to, an album full of interesting ideas and brilliant songs within songs that I never seem to get tired of. In a year with a highly contested top spot, Sunset Rubdown managed to become my obvious and only choice.

Tortoise- Beacons Of Ancestorship

Barring a generally excellent boxset and a not terrible/not great covers album with Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, it's been half a decade since we heard anything new from Tortoise. I can't say I was anticipating Beacons Of Ancestorship because their last one, It's All Around You, left me so disappointed. In my review of that album I said the following: "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." Well, take all of those points, reverse them, and you've got their new album, a shockingly good re-invigoration for a band who seemed to have nowhere to go but in circles.

The first thing that struck me about this album is that it doesn't sound like Tortoise. Gone are the distinctive marimbas/vibraphones and the patented Tortoise-y guitar sound. In its place are the electronic and experimental elements that made 1999's Standards my favorite Tortoise album. With a couple listens Beacons Of Ancestorship will seem more familiar and obviously a product of Tortoise, but there's a sense of fun and discovery all over the album, an energy and feel all of its own even when it hints back to other Tortoise albums. 'Gigantes' could fit on TNT with its acoustic guitar loops, tribal-esque percussion, and sense of patient floating. 'The Fall Of Seven Diamonds Plus One' is destined to play over the end credits of a film set in the West just as Millions Now Living Will Never Die's 'Along The Banks Of Rivers' had a similar filmic aesthetic. And the mysterious 'Monument Six One Thousand' could be a Standards outtake, a dirty electro drum beat bumping against a brilliantly atonal, repetitive guitar chord.

But even though Beacons Of Ancestorship may remind you of past Tortoise gems, it's never in the boring, recycled sounding manner that It's All Around You suffered under. In fact, I would say that this is one of Tortoise's more challenging albums even though it has riff heavy material like the impossible to spell or pronounce 'Yinxianghechengqi.' Album closer 'Charteroak Foundation' in particular will be a sticking point for most, with a guitar line that never seems to play in the same time signature as the rest of the band, a fascinating, melancholic arpeggio of a thing. Beyond this, though, what keeps the album from reaching the lofty heights of Standards is a lack of flow. The album never stands still and never spends too much time in dreamy atmospheres, yet something about the pacing and sequencing of the album lends it a disjointed, rocky air.

None of the songs are bad, none are out of place on the album, but there's an indefinable loss of whole-ness and unity on Beacons Of Ancestorship. A sense that the album runs out of steam after 'The Fall Of Seven Diamonds Plus One' persists in my mind, for what that's worth. This foible aside, Beacons Of Ancestorship stands amongst the strongest releases Tortoise have put out in addition to single-handedly making me re-interested in the band.

The Sea And Cake: Everybody

Let's visualize something together. Imagine yourself back as a child. You're on summer vacation. It's the afternoon and you find yourself inside. Maybe you're tired from playing in the morning or you're waiting for your parents to make lunch. The A/C is on and for whatever reason you lay on the floor and stare out the window, up at that endless expanse of blue with a few clouds marring it. You can feel a little air from the nearest floor vent, cold and dry on your skin. You start to hum something pleasant to yourself.

This is what listening to The Sea And Cake is like. I gave you a nice visual image to experience, but there really isn't anything remarkable about it, is there?? I probably did something like that a few dozen times as a kid but I never think about it or bring it up to anyone. They aren't bad memories, obviously, but they aren't amazing experiences or magical. This, too, is what listening to The Sea And Cake is like. They don't make bad music by any definition but it isn't amazing or magical. The Sea And Cake are, at least in my book, two paradoxes in one:

1) They've released eight albums yet none of them--with the exception of Oui--are essential; at the same time, all eight are good and contain at least a few songs that fans won't want to miss.

2) Their sound remains almost entirely the same from album to album yet each one has its own character and feel.

Whenever I get around to listening to each The Sea And Cake album, I come to the same conclusion: this album is pretty good; it's got some awesome songs yet it doesn't add up to anything that makes me want to write needlessly long reviews. Consistency, then, is the band's greatest strength and greatest weakness. You can pretty much pick up any of their releases and get a good idea of what all the rest of them will sound like. Yet like a jazz band, The Sea And Cake employ the same instruments and 'sound' on each album but the results and atmosphere are different enough that fans will undoubtedly prefer one over all the rest. All the while, to the average listener, it's the same thing again and again.

The Sea And Cake have made a career out of what can best be described as "easy listening indie pop/rock with touches of jazz and electronic music." Those two clean, crystalline guitars, melodic but almost imperceptible bass, propulsive but only slightly funky percussion, and a smooth-and-warm-but-a-bit-nasally-voice. Plus some keyboards or drum machines every so often. There are no true peaks and valleys or jagged edges in The Sea And Cake's music. The songs operate under two headings, either "relaxing and nocturnal" or "breezy and sunny." Also, their music doesn't sound quite right when listened to in the Fall or Winter. It's got an effervescent Spring/Summer tone to it that I never pick up on until it is the Spring/Summer and I listen to them more than usual.

Oui is the only The Sea And Cake album that casual fans will need, but I still find something oddly compelling about their other albums such as Everybody. It's mostly the "I want more of a good thing" notion, I suppose; if My Bloody Valentine had gone on to produce 6 more things that barely toyed with the Loveless formula, I don't know that I would have complained. Partially, though, I think Everybody and its ilk are just easy listening in the literal, non-pejorative sense. I wouldn't go so far as to say they're like vacations or breaks from other music, because I've never thought of music as something I need a vacation from, but still. There's an ease and immediacy to The Sea And Cake's albums that is taken for granted.

When I burned a CD copy of Everybody, the songs somehow got jumbled up so that 'Introducing' was the first song. I didn't notice my mistake for almost twoo weeks. That kind of thing would be damning about another album--the order of the songs should always be meaningful, right?? Right!!--but it demonstrates the laid back-ness of The Sea And Cake. I want to have stronger reactions to their music, even if they're negative reactions. As it is, I feel ambivalent. Well, it's ambivalent in a positive way. Unless you really despise the idea of a band standing still but remaining consistently good, you'll never end up in arguments about The Sea & Cake's discography. It just sort of is there, waiting for you to get bored in a record store someday and think to yourself, "maybe I'll finally get around to one of The Sea And Cake's albums...."

(An Hour Or So Later, After Returning Home And Listening To It)

"Hey, that was alright, I guess. It sure is a nice day outside. Wonder if it'll rain tomorrow?"

While putting the CD back in the case: "Wonder when the next Tortoise album is coming out...."

Primer: Tortoise Part 6- A Lazarus Taxon

There are many roles that a boxset can fulfill in a group's discography. It can collect hard to find and/or unreleased material, giving a glimpse into a band's other facets. It can give the fan an idea of how the band operates when the cameras are off, so to speak, with fly-on-the-wall studio outtakes and demos. It can be a best-of or chronological review of a band's development via cherry picked material from various albums and live performances. And probably a few other things I'm forgetting.

Tortoise, in their typical fashion, have chosen to go their own route with the boxset format, giving the listener a lot of material to wade through, but with precious little context or explanation. Granted, my copy of A Lazarus Taxon didn't come with the booklet for some reason, so it's possible I'm missing out. But since Tortoise's modus operandi is to be as mysterious and monolithic as possible, and thereby putting the emphasis on the music as much as possible, I suppose it's inessential.

The main thing that strikes me about this 3 CD and 1 DVD set is how little regard Tortoise have for their songs. By this I mean they don't see songs as singular, set-in-stone, precious things, but rather as small clusters of sections, melodies, textures, and concepts that combine in a certain way to make up larger albums. Given the scatter shot nature of the 3 CDs contained in A Lazarus Taxon which bring together B-sides, obscure singles, covers, remixes (both by Tortoise and of Tortoise), and other detritus, it's odd how familiar it all seems. But familiar in a good way. This is one boxset that satisfies the listener with a wealth of material but leaves you wanting more even if you're a hardcore fan who's heard their albums. Unfortunately, the DVD is a pretty big letdown because the live material isn't as revelatory as it should have been and only gives you vertical slices of Tortoise's live stuff; even the seven song set from a Toronto show in 1996 feels like a waste because of the poor video quality. The miming performance of 'Seneca' in animal costumes does finally let us know that the band have a sense of humor, but otherwise we learn nothing about Tortoise, in terms of the people behind the band, or Tortoise, in terms of the band's music, song titles, influences, etc. Even the stuff from the jazz festival, which does provide a legitimate connection to Tortoise's jazz influences, isn't as good as it sounds on paper. In the end, it's not so much “Tortoise, remixing--so to speak--their music for a jazz context” as it is “Tortoise with some jazz musicians playing slightly jazzier music than usual.” Call it a missed opportunity. Luckily, the non-DVD/non-live stuff is endlessly satisfying.

When I said just now that it was “odd how familiar it all seems”, “but in a good way”, well, we need look no further than the first two tracks of the first CD. True, they're hard-to-find songs from an obscure single or EP circa 1995, but 'Gamera' has the exact same guitar melody as 'His Second Story Island' off their first album. Similarly, 'The Source of Uncertainty' shares a section with either 'Djed' from Millions Now Living Will Never Die or 'Cliff Dweller Society' from the second CD. I'm not sure, and honestly I'm too lazy to go find out. Anyway, these obvious cases of recycling aren't a bad thing. It just demonstrates how Tortoise functions. Not to repeat myself yet again, but as I said earlier, Tortoise don't view their songs as precious things. They freely borrow ideas and sections from songs to use elsewhere, or, while recording albums, use studio equipment to rip and reorganize improvised material. This belief goes well with the interesting remixes spread across the three discs, particularly Tortoise's infamous take on Yo La Tengo's 'Autumn Sweater' and Nobukazu Takemura's remix of 'TNT.' More than anything else, the remixes of Tortoise's work reveal just how modular and malleable the band's music is. The third CD, a re-issue of a limited edition mini-album which featured different artists remixing tracks from the band's debut, pushes this point even further, becoming a companion piece to the album itself. This is the kind of thing Beck was going for with Guero and the subsequent Guerolito remix album, as well as the "do it yourself" approach to the deluxe edition of The Information.

Though the first two CDs offer much for the hardcore fan to savor, and serve as a reminder after the lukewarm It's All Around You that you still like this band, the third CD will reignite your appreciation for their first album and the band in general, offering enough of a hint of the songs you vaguely recognize as being from said debut album but completely re-configuring their DNA. This is the remix song form not as "futz with the chorus and add incessant drum beats to make this a club anthem" but as "let's completely reassemble the song from the ground up and make it something new and interesting." However, the heretofore unreleased Mike Watt remix is very dull, and more or less sounds like him playing along to the song rather than doing anything clever with it.

While I can complain that the DVD is a wash and it isn't the vault-clearing boxset it could have been, this is just nitpicking. In the end, returning to this boxset has revealed what the best boxsets do: give a fan something to spend an afternoon with. A Lazarus Taxon--despite its faults--manages to pull this off, and is a must-have for fans.

Video: Tortoise- Salt The Skies

What, did you think I was done with Tortoise?? Don't be absurd. I've still got the boxset to dig through. Meanwhile, I won't be updating tomorrow due to my work schedule, so this'll have to tide you over.

You may remember from my It's All Around You review that I don't like this song. This video is pretty interesting, visually, but since it's the only "official" Tortoise video, I guess I have to use it. No, the ones on YouTube you can find aren't "official", posted by Thrill Jockey records or not.

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.

Primer: Tortoise Part 4- Standards

There's an experimental, devil-may-care attitude to Tortoise's Standards that seems sorely missing in the rest of their catalog, and I'm not entirely sure why that is. But there is something about the album that just feels more lively and interesting than usual, from the way songs flow together to the conciseness of the album itself to the way new ideas and melodies come much more rapidly than they do on other Tortoise albums. It has the energy, the ebb and flow, of a masterfully planned/played live show, taking its time with the slower/mellower bits but not losing a listener's interest in the process.

Largely, the greatness of Standards--at least, the greatness I see in it--can be attributed to the way in which it was recorded. Where the overly long, occasionally kind-of-boring TNT was mostly written, improvised, and heavily edited in the studio over the course of a year, Standards was largely written beforehand and then embellished a bit in the studio in a much shorter period of time. Strange, then, that Standards is Tortoise's most electronic album. I don't mean that it's their techno album, just as TNT wasn't their jazz album. Instead, the inspiration is just more pronounced than usual. Standards features rhythms equally alongside the melodies, mixing the drums and bass as high as the other instruments, or, as is the case with the anomalous 'Monica', which doesn't sound much like Tortoise at all, borrowing a dreamy, synth-pop sound (with either a vocoder or a talkbox on a guitar) that is more readily found on a Daft Punk album.

Tortoise's weakness as a band is their precarious balance between being intriguing instrumental music and sleep inducing, immaculately played easy listening. This is something that came up a lot in reviews of their last album, It's All Around You, which brought little new ideas to the table and seemed content to coast on good graces. It may not prove as bad as my memory, but it's such a stark contrast to Standards, an album that helped pull the band back from the edge in my book. The tonal, textural, melodic, and rhythmic palette of the band has never been as wide and yet as deep as it is here. Though I think it may be the album on which Tortoise's patented vibraphones/marimbas make the least appearances, their sparing use makes them seem all the more unique and purposeful. Moreover, the band neither fall back on old habits nor the lazy dynamics of their post-rock contemporaries. Granted, I like many other post-rock bands, but you can sort of characterize most of the songs as being quiet-to-loud-and-back-again crescendo races. At the same time, when Tortoise do go back to the well for their minimalist interludes ('Firefly' could easily have fit unto TNT) or repetitive structures ('Eden 1' keeps the same grinding beat, though it fades to the background when ponderous guitars pick out a duet), it's never for very long. Finally, Standards has, outside of Millions Now Living Will Never Die, the best pacing and sequencing of any Tortoise album. A few of the songs do that segue thing that always gets my rocks off ('Seneca' into 'Eros', 'Firefly' into 'Six Pack') and in general, a deft balance is struck between intense exploratory Tortoise grooves (at least, what passes for a Tortoise groove anyway) and the chillier ambient spacey stuff.

One hopes that, after: 1) the lukewarm reception It's All Around You received 2) compiling the odds and ends boxset A Lazarus Taxon 3) performing Millions Now Living Will Never Die at different musical festivals over the past 2 or 3 years, the band were reminded of what made them great in the first place. One need look no further than Standards for what exactly Tortoise is capable of, an album that both sounded like Tortoise and added new pages to their recipe book at the same time.

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.

Primer: Tortoise Part 2/Album of the Week: Millions Now Living Will Never Die

I've always wondered something about this album, and I think it gives insight into how Tortoise operates. The liner notes to Millions Now Living Will Never Die reveal that Bundy K. Brown wrote a portion of 'The Taut and Tame', but curiously he was no longer in the band by this point. Instead, sometime between the release of the first album and this, he had left the band, and David Pajo (formerly of Slint) joined. The addition of an honest-to-goodness guitarist changed the Tortoise sound, but at the same time the proposition of Brown writing part of a song on which he doesn't even play speaks volumes for how Tortoise operates.

Furthermore, I recently re-watched the DVD portion of the A Lazarus Taxon boxset and was reminded how democratic the band is. Effectively a faceless band, their de-facto leader has always been perceived as John McEntire, but only because he engineers/produces the band's albums. During concerts--and I'm guessing for the recording of albums--the band switches instruments pretty frequently. All of this gives you the correct impression that Tortoise is not a band where ego ever comes up. Listening to their albums, which are marvels of restraint, you realize that every instrument is used for a reason. Nobody is playing something because they have to always be doing something otherwise they get mad. Members are content to lay off for a bit and let someone else take center stage; not in an improvisational or soloing kind of way, but in a melodic/rhythmic/textural kind of way.

Millions Now Living Will Never Die is an album I have no reservations about calling iconic. From its provocative title to its evocative album cover (schools of fish are a pretty good match for the imagery that the music sometimes creates in your head) to its unique pacing (more on this in a bit), the album frequently and rightly ends up on many best album lists, particularly as a tent pole of the post-rock genre. Clearly I love the album, and while I could conceivably see people not liking it who like post-rock, it's still undeniably one of the landmark releases of said genre. After all, I'm not the biggest fan of either of the Joy Division albums, but they're still landmarks for post-punk. I think you have to hear them to understand the genre.

The first two Tortoise albums are pretty strange when you go back to them. Their self titled debut, I've recently learned, didn't actually have any guitars at all. Instead, they used two bassists in interesting ways to cover up for it. At the same time, Tortoise was a fairly ambient and minimalist release. It does sound like Tortoise, but it's a very different band than the one now in existence. Millions... took a bassist away and added the unique guitar stylings of ex-Slint member David Pajo. Moreover, it's the odd man out in terms of its pacing: it has the least songs of any Tortoise album, and it has the single longest song from any of their albums in 'Djed', which at 20 minutes is more than twice as long as the nearest contender. (Side note to obsessive fans: yes, I know 'Cliff Dweller Society' is 15 minutes long, but it's not on an album). It's an anomaly in the band's discography to be sure, though because Tortoise albums are instrumental and sound the way they do, songs frequently flow together; another simpler way to put it is that Tortoise albums are meant to be listened to as a whole, so suck it up and give it your time, maaaaan.

As I discussed in my review of their debut, Tortoise's genius was to take the first stirrings of post-rock from Talk Talk's Laughing Stock and Slint's Spiderland, combine them together, and add their own spin to the whole thing. While Laughing Stock began from jazz, folk, and even classical music, and Spiderland began from prog rock, math rock, and borderline metal, Tortoise met these origins at a fork in the road, carrying behind them a cartload filled with dub, film music, electronic music, ambient, krautrock, and various world music influences (mainly in their use of vibraphones/marimbas and other assorted percussion). Though Tortoise is underrated, I would argue that it was on Millions Now Living Will Never Die where Tortoise really began to sketch out their own musical idiom and identity.

The album begins with the monolithic 'Djed', which is as good as you've been told. Assuming one were pressed to come up with a list of 'must hear' post-rock songs, I think you'd have to include 'Djed', or at least consider it as a prime contender for essential songs by Tortoise. Allow me to digress for a moment: I've always been puzzled by the title. Did the band mean for it to be taken as "DJ'd", as in a DJ, or pronounced in some weird accent like "duh-jed" or simply "jed" with a silent D?? In retrospect, I assume it was a nod to the way the song, like a proper DJ mixing and seguing songs together, stitches various mini-songs and ideas together in one epic collage. It is indeed a towering achievement for the post-rock genre, one that the listener should pause and savor like a cup of tea.

I must also give the rest of the album its due. 'Glass Museum' is an appropriately titled, immaculately played piece for chamber musicians, adding a nice dole of grit and rock during the section that starts around the three minute mark. 'A Survey' is a calm, ambient, bass driven throwback to the first album, while 'The Taut and Tame' is a peppy, crunchy workout for clattering percussion and distorted guitar. 'Dear Grandma and Grandpa' emerges from a haze of synth washes, and as the album's least guitar-centric, free floating piece, it recalls the more lucid, dreamlike sections of 'Djed' before seguing smoothly into closer 'Along the Banks of Rivers' on the back of a snare drum roll. This song is easily the band's most filmic, and reminds me of something that might be played at the end of a James Bond film from the late 60s, with its spy/noir-ish digital delay guitar, textural Rhodes piano accents, and jazzy, cymbal heavy percussion. For what it's worth, it's also a good song to drop unto the end of mixtapes as a palette cleanser or way to finesse an uneven time ratio between sides A and B.

One of the things I love about certain bands is their ability to combine the experimental and the accessible as well as the grounded/earthy and spacious/spacey. I'm thinking specifically of albums like Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, albums which wrap these seemingly conflicting musical approaches into one giant tapestry of brilliance. I'm not trying to directly compare the two, but Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die is similarly effective as Bitches Brew at challenging the listener with music that contains the above, in equally conflicting and complementary ways. Millions... is a fantastic album, and one that influenced many as well as being among those rare cases where a band is able to distill its influences in such a way to sound wholly original and show us musty ol', jaded music critics that we haven't heard it all before.

Primer: Tortoise Part 1/Album of the Week: Tortoise

It would be impossible to calculate the impact that Tortoise's first two albums had on underground music. Though Millions Now Living Will Never Die frequently, and rightly, gets the nod for being one of the first true masterpieces of the post-rock genre, it came a full two years after Tortoise. There's something to be said for being first, and Tortoise were the first band to take the lessons of post-rock precursors Laughing Stock (by Talk Talk) and Spiderland (by Slint) and spin it all into something strikingly new, taking influences as disparate (yet fairly sympathetic) as dub, jazz, kraut-rock, soundtrack/film music, ambient, psychedelia, and minimalism.

Tortoise is a fascinating album to go back to because of how little it sounds like the Tortoise we know and love. At the time the band were often using two bassists at once; moreover, the album sounds like the monolithic work of a mysterious group of as little as one person but no more than three. Once the "Tortoise sound", as it were, became established on Millions Now Living... and TNT, returning to the sound of this album is interesting because of how simple it is. Tortoise is without a doubt the band's most ambient and minimalist release, with a restraint and sparseness rarely seen in future post-rock. At least for such sustained periods of times, that is.

As with most instrumental music, the greatness of Tortoise lies in the moods it establishes, and the evocative sounds and melodies that spill forth. This album isn't quite as borderline-austere as later Tortoise releases, so you usually get a sense of something other than a museum, where formerly dirty and fascinating pieces of history (swords, paintings, stuffed wild animals, etc.) are given a cleaned up and detached viewing by audiences. Not that Tortoise is noisy or messy. Rather, it simply strikes me as less assured and more willing to take risks than most Tortoise albums. 'Onions Wrapped In Rubber' is nearly seven minutes of very little happening, other than some stray percussion and electronic sounds. 'Ry Cooder' is a classic Tortoise piece that has an addictive bass-and-vibraphone melody as its centerpiece. 'His Second Story Island' is a contemplative tone poem for electric guitar. 'Magnet Pulls Through' is a perfect opener for such a deliberately paced and atmospheric album, threatening to erupt into a chorus or crescendo before collapsing back into taut drumming and rhythmic interplay with guitars.

As both the first album from one of the genre's biggest bands and its first significant release (again, not counting Spiderland and Laughing Stock), Tortoise, today, seems like such a small, unassuming piece of music. Even if later bands pushed this music into huge, majestic crescendos, overwhelming but pretty noise, or borderline-metal instrumental prowess, Tortoise still stands as a testament to how some revolutions start with a whisper instead of a roar.

Reassessing Bad Albums For Fun and No Profit

Though reviews and criticism are ultimately subjective, certain consensuses are often reached. Whether it’s that such and such an album is the best thing a band has yet done or that it merely points the way to better things, if you read enough reviews of an album you begin to notice a collective assessment of it. And so, you often find albums agreed upon as disappointing, sophomore slumps, vanity/indulgence releases, etc. (Please note that I don’t mean out-and-out shitty albums, because there’s rarely much to reassess about them) Some of these are due as much to critical shortsightedness and misunderstanding as they are to the artists themselves.

Anyway, let’s reassess some of the more recent offenders, shall we??

The Album: Some Loud Thunder by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

The Offenses: Being too experimental; sounding too influenced by producer David Fridmann; having songwriting that classifies as spotty and weak.

The Reassessment: Some Loud Thunder is neither a secret masterpiece nor a total failure. It rests somewhere in between the two extremes, though I’d honestly say I liked it a lot better when I came back to it a few months after its release. Yes, it’s not as good as their debut, but it’s still a great album. It’s the difference between an A research paper and a B one, really.

The Album: Rehearsing My Choir by the Fiery Furnaces

The Offenses: Being a kind of radioplay/concept album/autobiography about the Furnace siblings’s Grandmother; being extraordinarily self indulgent; not working as an album or a musical; mostly featuring the vocal stylings of said Grandmother, which could be charitably described as “not very good and not befitting the music.”

The Reassessment: I’ve only managed to make it all the way through the album twice, if that tells you anything. Fiery Furnace albums are sort of like taking a shot of liquor: you just have to jump in and do it. Man up, as they say. Yes, their albums are overlong, complicated, and messy, but if you take the plunge and trust their instincts—as well as giving each album your full attention span for its run time—you are always rewarded. Rehearsing My Choir does not reward you, sadly. It’s more like taking a shot of liquor that you can’t quite get down because it turns out it was moonshine: it’s simply too much. Though every Fiery Furnaces album will inevitably be described as “great but just not as great as Blueberry Boat”, one can also safely say that everything they’ve released since and could possibly release in the future will be better and less indulgent than Choir.

The Album: Do The Collapse by Guided By Voices

The Offenses: Being a slicked up, overproduced GBV album; having weak songwriting; being a failed attempt at a major label debut and subsequently getting released on, oddly, industrial powerhouse TVT records; the-one-dude-from-the-Cars produced it and stipulated that the band couldn’t drink during its creation (seriously).

The Reassessment: The only song I can remember from the album is the opener, ‘Teenage FBI.’ Basically, Do The Collapse is like your least favorite album by your favorite band. There still remains all the things you love about them, but it still feels weak or a like mess or a misstep. And Do The Collapse is all three. And the “no drinking” thing just kind of pisses me off, frankly, because if you’ve ever seen or heard about a GBV show, you know that the drunker they get, the better they get. See their final show, captured on The Electrifying Conclusion DVD, for a good example.

The Album: It’s All Around You by Tortoise

The Offenses: Being a more-of-the-same, diminishing-returns kind of album; increasingly making the band into a Steely Dan-esque perfectionist studio beast without any blood.

The Reassessment: It’s All Around You is more of the same, with one or two twists—wordless vocals on ‘The Lithium Stiffs’, the noisy drum nightmare of ‘Dot/Eyes’—that are worth hearing for fans. Otherwise, it’s an entirely unnecessary and skippable release by a band who seem to have increasingly less ideas. And they desperately need to introduce some spontaneity and grit into their sound, because they’re beginning to sound like an austere museum piece.

The Album: NYC Ghosts & Flowers by Sonic Youth

The Offenses: Being too minimalist and noodle-y in some places, too self consciously noisy in others; having bad beat poetry for lyrics; being recorded after most of the band’s custom gear was stolen; representing the end-of-the-line if you didn’t like their 90s output.

The Reassessment: While being the weakest album the band have released in the past 15 years—actually, it’s more like “weakest album ever”—it’s still interesting and worth a few listens. Some of the lyrics are indeed embarrassing, but the music and overall sound of the album fascinate me in some strange way. It’s another side of a fascinating and still vibrant band that you may or may not like; you can say a lot of things about Sonic Youth and their development over the years, but they haven’t fallen into an old age trap of releasing boring, forgettable crap like, say…REM. Speaking of the devil…

The Album: Everything REM has released since at least New Adventures In Hi-Fi.

The Offenses: It’s sad to think that about a decade ago, people used to look forward to REM albums with the same fervor as they now do Radiohead ones. Yet in the past ten(+) years, the band has squandered their good standing with a string of releases that are utterly boring and unmemorable to the point that I can’t even distinguish them from each other. Sure, there are one or two good songs per album, but by and large, I sometimes forget the band hasn’t broken up already.

The Reassessment: Every time a new REM album comes out, some reviewer or critic will say it’s the beginning of a new creative phase in the band’s life. Or that such and such an album was a secret masterpiece, and we were all wrong to hate/ignore it. But…they’re all wrong. I want to be charitable to the band because they have released some amazing, timeless music, but they haven’t done this since the beginning of Clinton’s second term. My good faith has long since gone. Fuck REM.