Tortoise
A Lazarus Taxon
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Tortoise
A Lazarus Taxon
Thrill Jockey, 2006
RiYL: Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Stereolab |
But for a few minor lineup changes, Tortoise continues to this day, doing more or less the same thing they always did, if to diminished critical return. A Lazarus Taxon is hopefully the first of many odds-and-sods compilations, not the career-capping alternative retrospective it might be taken as by folks who haven't followed the band through the more incremental innovations of Standards (2001) and It's All Around You (2004). For the most devoted, it's more frustrating than anything else, since there's a wealth of fine material not included here.
As a history of a band, A Lazarus Taxon is fatally flawed. The early single "Lonesome Sound," which featured a lead vocal, ought to be here to represent the road not taken. It's wonderful that this collection finally makes available the long-lost Rhythms, Resolutions And Clusters remix mini-LP that followed the band's self-titled first album, but where is the equally obscure, but better Tortoise Remixed CD that covered Millions? Some of the less exciting remixes and alternate versions on Lazarus Taxon could happily have been excised in favor of a disc summarizing John McEntire's contemporaneous production work and the various side projects. If you haven't been paying close attention, A Lazarus Taxon won't catch you up all at once. It's not as willfully useless as the rarities albums Stereolab and Will Oldham crank out, but for a four-disc set there are a remarkably high number of oversights.
On another level entirely A Lazarus Taxon accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. While the tectonic shift in music Tortoise was supposed to be presaging never happened, the band was never all that revolutionary to begin with. Indeed, looking back across their reliably interesting career output from our present vantage point, the band looks more and more like the exact opposite of revolutionary: reactionary. In a good way though. Far from bringing on the end of music history as we recognize it, Tortoise' unapologetically cerebral music is a surprisingly complete and coherent synthesis of a number of significant trends in millennial pop music culture.
Most evident on every track of A Lazarus Taxon, up to and including the DVD live performances, is the prominent role that modern production technology has had on the development and presentation of Tortoise's music. Far from using funky software to simply polish and perfect their tracks, McEntire and his group have always actively used "the studio" as the final and perhaps most prominent instrument in the delivery of Tortoise music. The first track on Taxon is "Gamera," a little sibling to Millions' "Djed," the definitive Tortoise recording, and not by accident. Tortoise's most visionary aspect has never been their nonstandard instrumentation nor their lack of vocals. It's been their constant commitment to always rethinking the presentation of their music, even as it is being performed.
The track sequencing on the first two discs freely blends original compositions, remixes by Tortoise members, remixes by outside collaborators and in a few instances remixes of other bands' music by Tortoise. The effect isn't jarring because every Tortoise album is in a sense a remix album; documenting a single performance start to finish is never on the band's agenda. Sometimes songs on Lazarus Taxon sound as if they are picking up transmissions from entirely different pieces in the background and sometimes the outside intrusions take over. Sometimes familiar bits of melodies past introduce themselves only to diffuse into the unrecognizable, as on Autechre's stuttering, unresolving remix of "Ten Day Interval" or the band's own "Restless Waters," which claims to be a remake of "Dear Grandma And Grandpa" from Millions Now Living but resembles it in no way, shape or form.
Such descriptions make the music sound "difficult," but that's not the case. Tortoise wouldn't have raised all of the eyebrows they did if their music wasn't at its core beautiful, and this is beautiful stuff indeed, at times funky, at times austere, at times both. Nobukazu Takemura's remarkable remix of "TNT" takes seemingly every highlight of the slow-developing album version and throws them all at the listener at once. "Didjeridoo" is nominally a Duke Ellington tribute only filtered through a hundred spy movie soundtracks. "Sexual for Elizabeth" is wildly disjunct hip-hop. While Tortoise's album releases are usually acutely arranged, the single, EP, and unreleased tracks collected herein allow for an unusual amount of leisurely improvisation. These passages are a fine showpiece for the substantial talents of Jeff Parker, whose distinctive guitar tone is always recognizable even in the most processed Tortoise arrangements, and for the signature six-string bass work of Doug McCombs.
While the band's sound remains uniquely its own (that said, this is easily their least vibraphone-heavy release ever), through the length and breadth of A Lazarus Taxon you can track all of the trends in late-'90s/early '00s music to which I made reference earlier. After being hopelessly untrendy since the early 1970s, jazz made a minor comeback in this period, if mostly through secondary sources like hip-hip sampling, jazz-inflected jam bands like Phish and Medeski Martin & Wood, and the progressive Chicago scene of Tortoise and their acolytes. Although The Orb beat them out as true innovators, Tortoise solidified the place of "ambient" as a genre of music, while guaranteeing a satisfactory definition for said genre would never be possible.
As a band that employed "real" instruments in addition to synthesizers and yet undeniably performed "electronic" music, Tortoise contributed to the legitimization of all forms of electronica. The band's records very clearly make the point that the end product is more important than the means of production, and the series of DJ-friendly 12-inches they quite purposefully released in the wake of TNT (and sampled here on A Lazarus Taxon) helped solidify their tie to that particular community.
But not every '90s music trend that Tortoise found themselves caught up in was a positive one. Remember the cynical money-making tribute album craze? Is it even officially over? Well, you can relive the glory days with the true oddity of Tortoise's "As You Said," a Joy Division "cover" of an obscure, entirely commercially unavailable song that no one remembers that doesn't even sound remotely like that song anyway.
While A Lazarus Taxon doesn't work at all as an unexpurgated history of the band, it's more of a revisionist history by design. This is Tortoise as they'd like to be remembered (so far), what they have to say about their development as a band and how they have both influenced and been influenced by the musical world around them. It's also pretty enjoyable listening, although the Rhythms, Resolutions disc is rather outdated and the DVD mostly just cements Tortoise's reputation as one of the least visually interesting bands in modern rock posthistory. Still, for the price of two discs -- less, from some outlets -- you're getting five CDs worth of music, and the first two of those are like the best Tortoise album that's been released since TNT. Now, it's on the band to make this just a chapter stop and not the grand finale.
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.