On Beacons of Ancestorship, Tortoise stick to few winning basics
by Matt Sullivan
Author Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life details the foundations of the American D.I.Y. network and the origins of underground indie rock throughout the 1980s. As '70s punk rock rejected the grandiose and elaborate, so too did the independent bands and labels that followed punk's first wave. Bloated prog and arena rock drew punk's ire, and the sentiment behind the title of Azerrad's book (lifted from a Minutemen song) was the idea that rock music was at its best when most immediate. But as the confines of the underground stretched and came to incorporate broader influences, indie rock found itself in a curious position in the mid-'90s — bands started taking cues from the very music punk was sworn to oppose. A lot of this was Slint's fault. After that, instrumental bands like Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor compounded the problem, but right in the middle was Chicago's Tortoise, who demonstrated better than anyone how indie rock was tripping all over itself.
The problem Tortoise posed was that their band could be your life only if you were incredibly patient and obsessively meticulous. Concision and simplicity were long gone at this point, as Tortoise made a virtue of championing what for years had been patently uncool. Some clever person would eventually call what all these bands were doing "post-rock," but what Tortoise was really onto was an extension of the trippy shit the Krautrock bands had been doing in Germany — only more American-sounding. Can, Faust and Neu! all experimented with melding electronics and more traditional instruments; Tortoise took those ideas and infused their own instrumental forays with jazzy time signatures, polyrhythms and guitar spaghetti. And while their peers focused in large part on dynamics, Tortoise championed subtlety. They could muscle through a climax as powerfully as the rest but favored unorthodoxy over bombast.
Within these contexts, the 21-minute opener on their 1996 landmark Millions Now Living Will Never Die is less a mindfuck because of its length than because it demands so much from the listener. The climaxes in "Djed" aren't obvious, and if you weren't paying attention, you'd swear they never come. But perhaps even more surprising, this approach proved a winning one, and Tortoise's influence colored indie rock for many years to come. Instrumental bands became a norm, and Tortoise's sonic ambitions telegraphed the moves of future noise bands like Fuck Buttons and Black Dice.
But over the past several years a lot of us forgot about Tortoise. Big, sprawling music had once again fallen out of favor, and the sheer number of post-rock instrumental bands that Tortoise helped spawn diluted a sound that already teetered on the edge of boredom in the first place. In the meantime, The Strokes had reintroduced the world to the long lost slacker anti-hero and reclaimed cool to its rightful owners. The present day fixation on singles doesn't play to Tortoise's strong suits either, so in a way, the independent labels have traveled full circle. Indie rock lapped the slower moving Tortoise.
This setting pits the release of Tortoise's most recent album Beacons of Ancestry against a similar backdrop to the one in which they made a big splash in '96. Their cerebral approach is more striking when its course is set upstream, but the successes on Beacons aren't all the result of extenuating circumstances. Plus, this parallel we've drawn between the settings in which Millions and Beacons were each released isn't without its holes. In recent years, the band Battles have garnered attention by sounding quite a bit like Tortoise, so it's high time we all revisited the sound of the future.
Given their ambitious history, there isn't much surprising on Tortoise's new record, though there's plenty to remind us why they matter. Most of the tracks on Beacons contain the fractured dance rhythms that have always made Tortoise more easily digestible than they should be, laced with an equal number of immediately catchy hooks and sneaky changes. The rhythm section takes center stage, with lead track "High Class Slim Came Floatin' In" opening with a kind of robotic dub before breaking down into bleeps and burps of deep funk. By the end of the song a wall of synthesizers and bass collapses in on itself, and the line between how it all began and how it all ended gets a little blurry. Once reaching the middle of the album, the mush-mouthily titled "Yinxianghechengqi" jars us out of the trancey daze that had begun to set in with a track uncharacteristically abrasive. But as is the case with everything Tortoise does, the chaos is carefully controlled. The album then moves into a schizophrenic spaghetti western soundtrack before ending with a set of songs that balance instruments played seemingly with different goals in mind — and it works.
The fact that none of this comes as a surprise and is even expected from this band can make their best work sometimes easy to overlook, which has always lent Tortoise to the type of band that was destined to be rediscovered years after the fact. They screwed that all up by getting noticed the first time around.
Email music@nashvillescene.com.
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