Album Of The Week: Fuck Buttons- Tarot Sport

It's pretty telling that the first track on Tarot Sport, the new album from Fuck Buttons, is called 'Surf Solar', while the last is dubbed 'Flight Of The Feathered Serpent.' For a duo who mostly spent their debut hovering in place while exploring textural noise, droney minimalism, and, from time to time, incomprehensible muffled screams, it's quite a change to see them producing an album that has a sense of headlong momentum and movement. So, too, have they stripped away most of the noise and all of the screaming while still retaining their own unique electronic sound. Perhaps the biggest change from the (conditionally) must hear Street Horrrsing, however, is that Fuck Buttons are now making something definable as music instead of something that was arguably just musical experiments with the periodic table of sound elements.

Tarot Sport's most crucial progression is the way that the band have embraced the dynamics of songwriting rather than the dynamics of pure sound. The entirety of the album is one long suite that flows into each subsequent song; moreover, they also allow natural ebbs and flows to take place. There's a downright post-rock-ian "peaks and valleys, louds and quiets, minimalism and maximalism" structure to these tracks that helps Tarot Sport connect on an emotional level. I enjoyed Street Horrrsing as a sonic curio, a kind of intellectual think-piece, but it's not the sort of release I feel a connection with or wistfully get urges to listen to again. Not so with Tarot Sport.

I have to admit that I was skeptical when this album started getting really good reviews, since Street Horrrsing was such a demanding, difficult listen. But once the beautiful keyboard washes on the opening of the album kicked in, I immediately had to chuck my expectations out the window. One easy way to put it is that Tarot Sport plays like an IDM/post-rock remix of their first album, gutting out the screams entirely (vocals-without-screaming show up on one track, though I can't for the life of me remember which one), keeping some of the noise elements as texture and contrast rather than the focus, and adding in both persistent electronic beats and post-rock's emotional peaks and valleys. Hell, 'The Lisbon Maru' could pass for a particularly experimental Godspeed! You Black Emperor or Mogwai track, while 'Phantom Limb' has more in common with the experimental beat fuckery of modern Autechre than it doesn't.

Street Horrrsing may have gotten them on the radar, but Tarot Sport is the release that proves Fuck Buttons deserve whatever praise and attention they can get. There's a flow, pacing, and sheer enjoyability to the experience of this album that is years more advanced beyond the debut: in a year with some really excellent, epic, and memorable closing tracks, 'Flight Of The Feathered Serpent' is one of the best. 'Brothersport' and 'Watching The Planets', eat your heart out. Tarot Sport is not for everyone, as it retains some of the noisy textures/washes of sound of their earlier work, but those looking for what is arguably the best and most interesting electronic album of 2009 would be wise to seek it out.

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.

Album of the Week: Dirty Three- Ocean Songs

The apartment complex I recently moved into is build around an artificial lake of sorts. Already I find myself going out there at night to stare at the water, at the way the lights seem to melt into it, thinking about whatever is keeping me awake. I try not to put stock into the fact that I love the water because I'm an Aquarius but maybe there's something to it. I've always loved swimming pools, baths/showers, liquids in general. I never failed to miss Shark Week as a kid; I love sea food. Ironically, though, I never learned how to swim. Anyway, I've had water on the brain lately, so it's only natural I finally got around to Ocean Songs by Dirty Three, a beautiful, semi-conceptual ode to the seas. As with other aquatic phenomena, I love it to death.

A trio of percussion, guitar, and violin, you may wonder how the Dirty Three could craft a fitting oceanic album. Any fan of film soundtracks, jazz, or instrumental music in general can tell you that not having vocals to worry about often makes for the best 'tribute' music, whether it be Miles Davis's Sketches Of Spain or Matmos's A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure. All three members of the Dirty Three use their instruments to the best textural, melodic, and rhythmic effect, creating music that, yes, ebbs and flows like the tides. The album's most astonishing and accomplished songs--'Authentic Celestial Music' and 'Deep Waters'--are also by far its longest, giving the listener the feel of an epic journey across the water with storms, wind, clear skies, and sun all thrown in.

The Dirty Three don't quite fit into the two genres I would associate them with, post-rock and slowcore, because they aren't experimental enough for the former and aren't always slow and somber enough for the latter. I guess I could justa call them "true originals." Even taken separately, none of the members sound much like other, similar bands. Jim White uses the entire range of his drum kit to full effect not unlike a jazz musician, rolling and accenting but always keeping the beat. Mick Turner's guitar lines are always seemingly afloat, lagging behind or rushing forth unexpectedly; short two or three note lines give way to rhythmic chording or patient melodies. And Warren Ellis's violin soars above it all like a seagull, at other times whipping the water into a frenzy with distortion and rapid swells. All of their albums bear the same elements that are at play on Ocean Songs, but given the emphasis on a consistent 'feel' and 'theme', the album comes off as their best and most focused.

Polvo- Exploded Drawing

While listening to Polvo for the first time, I began thinking about how most of the music we think of as post-rock is mostly descended from Tortoise and Mogwai and not the accepted Slint or Talk Talk starting points. However, there actually were a lot of bands who closely studied Spiderland, Slint's 1991 masterpiece, and went from there. Bands like June Of 44, The Shipping News, Rodan, and, yes, Polvo picked up on the experimental guitar based rock music of that album. But none of these bands has ever cracked into the mainstream or produced an album that is widely known or critically acclaimed. Why is this??

Well, before I get to that, I want to make an important distinction here. This may seem pointless since genre classifications are by nature fluid and meaningless, but we've got to have something we can use when talking about different styles. So: bands like Polvo fly closer to math rock than post rock. There's a lot of overlap between the two, but bands like those named above usually focus on extended instrumental passages using guitars, unique tunings, and non-traditional time signatures instead of the more overtly impressionistic music of post-rock, which normally has keyboard/electronic elements to it (often borrowing liberally from kraut rock, dub, ambient, and sometimes jazz in the process).

The problem with this--and with post-rock/math metal bands in general--is that none of them have recorded anything as good as Spiderland. This may seem like an unfair level to compare them to, but I would argue that almost all of the Tortoise/Mogwai inspired post-rock bands have matched or bested the best efforts of those two bands. See, the thing about math rock is that because of the frenetic playing and complexity it often comes off like prog rock but much more dissonant and experimental. And lacking memorable tunes. Spiderland is so brilliant and memorable because while Slint really got down into some distorted, angular guitar playing and flat out rocking moments they also wrote some affecting, powerful songs. I think I mentioned this in my review of Spiderland, but watching the band perform it live a few summers ago at the Pitchfork Music Festival, I could look around and see thousands of people who had, like me, memorized every deft movement.

This brings us to Exploded Drawing. It is a good album, indeed, often very good. The songs are perfectly competent and always interesting to listen to, but, well, nothing really sticks with you. It's the same thing I see happening with modern noise/indie/rock/experimental bands with mostly unprintable names like Holy F*ck, F*ck Buttons, HEALTH, et. al.: they have interesting sounds/textures and their songs are flat out cool and/or rocking, but none of it really sticks with you. Billy Corgan once dismissed Pavement by saying something like "no one wakes up humming Pavement songs", which is provably false, but it's the kind of thing I think about when I listen to those bands and Exploded Drawing. I enjoy it, I don't regret the money I spent on it, and I'll probably listen to it a few times a year for the rest of my life. But it'll never be the album I make copies of for people I know; it'll never be the album I put on 'best of' or 'my personal favorite' lists.

This review may seem like an indictment of math rock-leaning post rock in general and Exploded Drawing in particular, but it wasn't my original intention. In all fairness I would qualify this album as above average post-Slint indie rock and the "math rock-leaning post rock" bands mentioned above are all worth checking out for those interested. Assuming you like this kind of stuff, Exploded Drawing is highly recommended. However I caution anyone looking into these bands--Shipping News is the only one I can really vouch for, because I don't have any full lengths by June of 44 or the others--and hoping for some kind of underground, undiscovered masterpiece on the level of a Spiderland. I fear that Exploded Drawing is the sort of thing an over eager record store employee or *ahem* music critic might foist upon you with the best intentions. But there's a line between very good genre excursions and very good, lasting music. Polvo managed to make the former but not the latter. To put it simply, they don't transcend their genre.

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.

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.

Album of the Week: Talk Talk- Laughing Stock

I generally don't try to make significance out of coincidences, but it's difficult for me not to start this off without pointing out that, in 1991, Slint's Spiderland and Talk Talk's Laughing Stock were released. Post-rock being one of the most important and fascinating 'underground' genres to emerge in the mid-90s in both the UK and American music scenes, it's also important to note that Slint were an American band and Talk Talk were English. Also, listening to the two albums back to back, they don't sound much alike in the same way that no two post-rock bands will sound much alike, but still feel as though they occupy the same space.

Laughing Stock was the last and most experimental album released by Talk Talk. By this point, the band were almost fully a studio-only creature, giving the band plenty of time to craft this masterpiece. Drawing on a mix of jazz, ambient, and rock, Laughing Stock is a unique and, I daresay, magical piece of music. Nothing else sounds quite like it, from the angry crescendos of 'Ascension Day' to the half jazz/half krautrock beat of 'After The Flood' to the gorgeous but melancholic 'New Grass', built on top of pristine guitar chords. The deft and often unorthodox use of strings and horns only adds to the totally original and brilliant palette of sounds. If Spiderland didn't sound like anything other American bands were doing at the time of its release, let alone any bands anywhere, well, Laughing Stock didn't either.

I want to sort of pick up that thread and run with it, because as much as one can say the albums were influential on the post-rock genre, they still exist on their own. The Wikipedia entry for Laughing Stock mentions that reviews noted the album's kinship with In A Silent Way by Miles Davis, and that actually makes a lot of sense. In A Silent Way is a similar mix of jazz, rock, and ambient music, though it sounds entirely different. The same goes for Spiderland, which sticks more closely to a rock sound but approaches it from strange new angles via math rock, prog rock, minimalism, and so forth. Those looking to dig into the roots of post-rock (which, admittedly, go further back than 1991) will find in Spiderland and Laughing Stock touchstones for the sub-genre as well as elements and ideas they have never heard before.

This may just be my American perspective talking, but I feel as if Laughing Stock has been forgotten. Pitchfork actually ranked it above Slint's Spiderland on their 'Top 100 Albums of the 90s' feature 5 years back, but I don't think there's any doubt which album is better known or more listened to these days. Which is a shame, because there is so much to enjoy and dwell inside with this album. If music could ever be compared to a perfect dreamscape you wish you didn't have to wake up from, you could do worse than using Laughing Stock to argue it.

Album of the Week: Do Make Say Think Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn

It's snowing right now, with a nasty cutting wind to boot, and two hours ago a friend informed me that his father died after battling cancer for two years. I didn't really know what to say to him, other than "I'm sorry", but I also added that he's probably sick of hearing people tell him they're sorry. It's these kind of situations where you realize language will always fail: nothing you say can or could make that person feel better or help you understand. Sometimes a picture isn't worth a thousand words, because those words can never fully capture what seeing the picture is like for each person. So, the weather is nasty and I feel bad for my friend, and no album seems to capture what I'm feeling with words, so I reach for something instrumental, because music transcends.

Right now, Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn is spinning on my record player, and it's exactly what I need, like the aural equivalent of a bowl of hot soup. However, I find that instrumental music is hard to talk about because you end up with a series of florid, poetic descriptions of sound that still don't come close to capturing what it really is. I could tell you that the first track, 'Fredericia', starts out with a sound like a whale moaning over and over before little fish begin peaking in and around the whale, finally passing it up entirely and climbing to the surface where sunlight breaks the silence. Yet if you listened to it, you might picture it or explain it entirely differently. Yet I can't think of another, better way to talk about the album, so bear with me if I descend into a thousand word exchange rate for each song. But I digress.

Of all the post-rock bands going today, only Explosions in the Sky can compete with Do Make Say Think in my book. Old standard bearers like Tortoise, Mogwai, Godspeed, et. al. are still releasing music that ranges from "digging the same hole in different directions" to "actually great, but not groundbreaking." Yet something about the melodies, dynamics, instrumentation, and the unexplainable sound pictures these two bands paint transcends their forefathers.

Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn is divided roughly into thirds, and on the vinyl, completely into thirds--the fourth side is blank. Each side is three songs long, and represents each titular "hymn", though the album's sound doesn't drastically change between each. What I mean is, the first third of the album--"Winter Hymn"--doesn't sound any more or less wintery to me than the other two.

The band's sound ranges the usual post-rock gamut from quiet, almost ambient moments to out-and-out, all instruments to 11 rocking. Do Make Say Think also features brass/horns/woodwinds, as well as violin, and--lest I forget--a healthy spoonful of rustic folk/acoustic aesthetics. Which makes sense, given that the band often records in rural surroundings, like farmhouses or barns owned by family and friends. And if any of it sounds slightly familiar, well, some of the members of Do Make Say Think contribute to Broken Social Scene, that monolithic Canadian collective, so some aesthetic traces show up in both camps.

The only basis for comparison I have for Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn is You, You're A History In Rust, their most recent release. That was one of my favorite albums of 2007, but I would have to say, I think Hymn is better. Sometimes a band just nails it, for lack of a better explanation--the songs are there, the melodies are there, and it sounds incredible, plain and simple. It's the difference, to use another example, between a great live jazz album and an average one. There's just something about it that you love and can't explain. Words can't convey what 'Outer Inner & Secret' makes me feel when it gets to the series of crescendos built on top of thudding drums and two-note guitars, rising and falling and giving me goosebumps. It's like...well, it's like what certain hymns do to my Mom. You feel magical, spiritual, and beyond words.

The music of Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn is the music of blinding snowfalls, late summer country sunsets, and the little things you hum to yourself, unconsciously, when you're feeling beside yourself with some overwhelming emotion. Please, do yourself a favor and get this album.