Tortoise
It's All Around You
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Tortoise
It's All Around You
Thrill Jockey, 2004
RiYL: Can, the Orb, vibraphones |
Regarding Tortoise, then. It is hard for anyone, even the most devout fans of the esteemed Chicago instrumental quintet, to deny that the band has been in slow but steady decline since its genre-defining 1996 masterpiece Millions Now Living Will Never Die. Part of the problem is that record's very impact -- you can't unring a bell, and you can't hear Tortoise first for the second time. More galling is the crowd of bands who have appropriated Tortoise's instrumentation wholesale without any sense of what lies behind it.
It's All Around You is an average Tortoise album, which is kind of a sad thing to say. It's pleasant throughout, and none of the band's members have lost their touches. Doug McCombs' Fender bass VI is restored to full clarity here after the muted, muddled Standards, and it leads the boys through 10 tracks that will surprise no one who has heard any Tortoise music before.
Jeff Parker seems to be settling more into his role as guitarist, no easy task for a band that self-consciously didn't use guitars at all for their first spate of recordings. On the opening title track he actually gets to -- gasp! -- improvise a little. The drums (you can never tell who's providing them, as Dan Bitney, Dan Herndon, and John McEntire take turns) are wonderfully off-kilter, and the obligatory vibraphones are there in full force.
"On The Chin" is a quite lovely, chipper little piece that, like most of the album's better songs, sounds like it could have been one of the weaker ones on TNT. Chicago indie voice-about-town Kelly Hogan drops by for some wordless contributions to "The Lithium Stiffs," the first of several more ponderous songs on the album's opening half. The disc is continuously sequenced, such that telling when one song begins and another ends becomes difficult, but the best tracks, like "Chin" and the penultimate "Five Too Many," make their presence felt.
In fact, there's nothing particularly wrong with It's All Around You. It's a nice little record to listen to during a rainstorm, provided you have access to one. But it's simply not as revelatory as what Tortoise has done before. It's an improvement over Standards, which sounded unfinished, but it's nowhere near the peaks of Millions, TNT, or even the self-titled first album's great "Tin Cans And Twine."
Will fans care? Maybe not, I guess. But if you're not a Wicker Park resident, you can skip this one without compunction.
MARK DONOHUE | Known to some as "Western Homes," Mark is a graduate of UC Berkeley, a starving musician, and a Cubs fan. Be afraid. Very afraid.