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Since the mid-90s Chicago band Tortoise have been producing albums which resolutely avoid easy classification. You might pin a label on a track or two but any attempt to apply one across an entire album is never going to work.
Their collective approach to music-making (as befits a band of multi-instrumentalists) is their secret weapon. Freed from specific roles the band have been able to roam pretty much wherever their fancy takes them for over 20 years.
Six albums in and this fluidity of approach continues. Their snappy combination of intellect and intuition sweeps up lo-fi grooves, fat, barbed-wire coated bass lines and fuzz-laden beats, into an engagingly accessible record.
Though the cut and paste collages of their early career path remains, increasingly it's been spliced with a more demonstrative, visceral dimension.
Prepare Your Coffin goes straight for the jazz-rock jugular evoking a version of Return To Forever crossed with The Stooges. Using weedy analogue synths they've avoided any pitch-bend excesses whilst aping the high-octane nature of the genre.
Tortoise have always opted to sprinkle their music with a sassy exotica. Chilled cymbalom rattles various rhythmic cages that vibrate, buzz and jitter during the stop-start thrum of Gigantes, and Minors has an intriguing lop-sided John Barry-style melody that would make a perfect fit for a spy movie soundtrack.
Ambient? Post-rock? Indie? Experimental? All of the above? You can't really pigeon-hole Tortoise but when the music is this good why would you want to bother? --Sid Smith
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Beacons of Ancestorship starts misleadingly, with the stop-start, rambling track `High Class Slim Came Floatin' In", but in a way it's a good way to begin the album, pricking the attention without blowing the best bits straight away. With "Prepare Your Coffin", the second track, the album's ambitions are laid out a little more clearly: this is focussed, tight and dare-I-say-it funky, with a deliciously meaty production. From here on in they keep strictly to the point, via highlight "Gigantes", through the overdrive punk of "Yinxianghechengqi" to the beautiful album closer "Charteroak Foundation". Along the way there are some perhaps less memorable bridging tracks mixed in, but the whole experience, clocking in at a trim 43 minutes, is very satisfying while leaving me wanting more, which is just how it should be.
Although I'm not a connoisseur of Tortoise's back catalogue, this is the most consistently melodic and `listenable' that I've heard them. As an album it flows brilliantly and although not every track is a highlight the whole is very much more than the sum of its parts.
Although I'm not a connoisseur of Tortoise's back catalogue, this is the most consistently melodic and `listenable' that I've heard them. As an album it flows brilliantly and although not every track is a highlight the whole is very much more than the sum of its parts.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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12 reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
it is still stuck in my head....
31 July 2009
The only thing that overshadows the album itself is their live performance of it. The songs are well structured and find themselves in a niche that only Tortoise seems to fill. The mallet work done in track 4 is impressive as well as inventive, but I think seeing them preform it live really won my heart. If you have ever heard Tortoise before , or if you were brought to this album by a different means, please pick it up. I have not enjoyed an instrumental album such as this in a long time. Lets just hope they can keep 'em coming!
10 of 13 people found the following review helpful
"Beacons of Ancestorship" is very good.
13 July 2009
Amazon Verified Purchase
If you were frightened away from Tortoise a few years back because you found "It's All Around You" a little too tame and muted, then considered said weaknesses to be rectified this time around with "Beacons of Ancestorship." I liked Tortoise's last proper album, but I realize that it wasn't their most popular. "Prepare Your Coffin" helps put the 'rock' back into 'post-rock.' I know, that was bad. But I hope you get my point.
It all sounds like Tortoise just woke up from a very refreshing nap. Not to say they were absent or in danger of dying out. Just like the mammal they are named after, they continue to be able-bodied as they age and may very well surprise us when they reach the geriatric stage. They just take their time getting there is all.
"High Class Slim Came Floatin' In" sounds much like its name. Here comes Tortoise, this high class band hitting the ground with an unassuming yet entirely assured start that shifts gears halfway through. If you liked Tortoise at any point, even if you decided to stop following them in 1996, "Beacons of Ancestorship" has lots entice you back into the pool. I mean, pond. Okay, someone please stop me.
It all sounds like Tortoise just woke up from a very refreshing nap. Not to say they were absent or in danger of dying out. Just like the mammal they are named after, they continue to be able-bodied as they age and may very well surprise us when they reach the geriatric stage. They just take their time getting there is all.
"High Class Slim Came Floatin' In" sounds much like its name. Here comes Tortoise, this high class band hitting the ground with an unassuming yet entirely assured start that shifts gears halfway through. If you liked Tortoise at any point, even if you decided to stop following them in 1996, "Beacons of Ancestorship" has lots entice you back into the pool. I mean, pond. Okay, someone please stop me.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
it's Tortoise... it really is!
6 Oct 2009
Format:Audio CD
"Beacons" seems a direct outgrowth of allegations that Tortoise had become too smooth, too studied. These rumblings started around the time of the sprawling but otherwise emininently praiseworthy "TNT," intensified after the rock and jazz experimentalism of the surprisingly concise "Standards," and found their nadir with "It's All Around You," which WAS in fact too smooth and studied -- no doubt a critical and commercial low for the band. "Beacons of Ancestorship" feels like a direct response to that perceived creative slump, from its almost obtusely minimal packaging to its percussion-heavy grooves and dialed up tempos. It is a refreshing reprisal on many musical fronts, from banishing the languid pleasantries of the preceding album to bringing back some of the weirder electronic sounds that had established footholds on "Standards."
Tortoise has had to deal with critical backlashes almost from day one -- always "too" this or "not enough" that -- but the energized 45 minutes of this latest offering serve notice, willfully pushing away their more delicate listeners, almost issuing a challenge to verbose and fickle music reviewers. If there is any shortfall to this newly abrasive and challenging iteration of the Tortoise canon, it's a somewhat heavy reliance on processed and distorted synthesizers to carry the melodic ideas of the songs. The more organic elements are subtle and subdued this time around: a staticky fade-out here, some fingerpicked guitar there. It isn't until track 7 "The Fall Of Seven Diamonds..." that a readily identifiable Tortoise-style guitar-and-bass melody appears. This time, Tortoise comes on with a breathless rush, only offering breathing space in the latter half of the album. Like anything good, "Beacons" reveals itself in layers after several listens. In no way should it be characterized as a "step back" or a "return to form" -- those are lazy terms and this is far from a lazy album. Tortoise accomplished everything they set out to with "Beacons:" a refreshed rawness, renewed vigor, slightly punked-up postrock that is most definitely NOT for the uber-hip to playlist for background music at their next poetry reading.
If you liked "Standards," this new album will feel like it's looser, louder cousin.
Tortoise has had to deal with critical backlashes almost from day one -- always "too" this or "not enough" that -- but the energized 45 minutes of this latest offering serve notice, willfully pushing away their more delicate listeners, almost issuing a challenge to verbose and fickle music reviewers. If there is any shortfall to this newly abrasive and challenging iteration of the Tortoise canon, it's a somewhat heavy reliance on processed and distorted synthesizers to carry the melodic ideas of the songs. The more organic elements are subtle and subdued this time around: a staticky fade-out here, some fingerpicked guitar there. It isn't until track 7 "The Fall Of Seven Diamonds..." that a readily identifiable Tortoise-style guitar-and-bass melody appears. This time, Tortoise comes on with a breathless rush, only offering breathing space in the latter half of the album. Like anything good, "Beacons" reveals itself in layers after several listens. In no way should it be characterized as a "step back" or a "return to form" -- those are lazy terms and this is far from a lazy album. Tortoise accomplished everything they set out to with "Beacons:" a refreshed rawness, renewed vigor, slightly punked-up postrock that is most definitely NOT for the uber-hip to playlist for background music at their next poetry reading.
If you liked "Standards," this new album will feel like it's looser, louder cousin.
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