Imagine this: vacation at Disneyland, circa 1979. You're seven years old, taking a leisurely ride with Mom and Dad on the People Mover. Now, with eyes closed, imagine the music coming from the plastic speaker inside the car. It's somehow ultra-modern and painfully dated at the same time, a well-scrubbed science-fiction soundtrack that sounds just as chipper and cheerful as it does frightening and foreboding. Mickey's synthetic melodies create vague images of 21st Century Living as you travel to destination Future. Open your eyes: you've not only arrived at the Matterhorn, you've heard the new Tortoise album along the way.
With an unending cavalcade of bleeps, bloops, and electronically enhanced, digitally remastered loops, Standards is nothing if not a perfectly well made, perfectly well intentioned album. The arrangements are creative and the production is flawless, but unlike the record that made them famous, 1996's Millions Now Living Will Never Die, which unapologetically set the standard for guitar bands yearing to explore their cerebral side, Standards seems to suffer from a major lack of cohesive structure. Imagine Uncle Walt designing a sequel to the People Mover, for instance, but instead of whipping up a new set of cars and changing the scenery, he simply shuffled the visuals around a bit and didn't change the soundtrack at all. We'd be miffed, right? Welcome to the new Tortoise album, tracks one through ten. Keeping the holier-than-thou spirit of smart-guy computer rock alive and kicking seems more important to John McEntire and Co. than, say, whipping up a truly catchy pop tune (which only happens once on Standards, a maddening three and a half minutes into the third track).
To be fair, though, Tortoise has never been a band which purports to write catchy pop tunes. They may play with guitars, drums, keyboards and xylophones (and xylophones and xylophones), but their schtick is actually more firmly founded in the tenants of minimalism, a hugely experimental--and oftentimes unlistenable--genre of music that was born after two guys tinkering around with a cassette recorder discovered the possibilities of looping tape.
Early pioneers like Brian Eno and Phillip Glass laid the foundations of popular minimalism in the 1970s, and along the way everyone from the Velvet Underground to Sonic Youth has referenced the genre in their music. What made it all work, of course, were the solid structures of folk and punk and noise that surrounded the concept and made it seem special and new, time after time. But somehow, in the last ten years or so a new scene built solely on soundscapes and pitch patterns was born in Chicago--a scene that seems to place the minimalist aesthetic on a higher pedestal than regular rock concepts like consonance and rhythm and a 12-tone sound structure. That's all well and good, of course, for folks like Eno and Glass. Their music is studied in universities and played in museums. But what about Tortoise, and the rest of the supposedly intellectual Chicago math-rock bands who take their influence from rhythmic rock and free jazz and draw fans with an interest in little else? Is there any point in recording the same ideas, over and over? Maybe. Will narrow-minded musicians start taking notice if the minimalist-cool aesthetic starts moving into the mainstream? Doubtful.
Oh well. What it all comes down to, really, is the simple law of supply and demand. If rock bands keep making ambient-noise records, and rock fans keep buying them, everyone stays happy. Sounds like a philosophy even Mickey Mouse could live with.
(Thrill Jockey)
Dan Eldridge, Resonance, February 2001