Standards

About

The jury seemed hung when Tortoise released its fourth album, <i>Standards</i>, in the winter of 2001. Three years earlier, the band had wowed listeners with <i>TNT</i>, an overdub assemblage of nuanced jazz by an ensemble of instrumental ace. But it was unclear where the group would go next. Guitarist David Pajo soon exited, leaving the wonderfully eccentric Jeff Parker to handle guitar duties by himself. And in 1999, Tortoise served as the backing band for the first US tour of Brazilian radical Tom Zé—“the best music teacher you could imagine,” drummer John Herndon remembered more than a decade later. Those shifts and experiences granted the members of Tortoise the necessary license to push further than before. The result was <i>Standards</i>, which used “jazz” or “post-rock” as launching points to explore soul, funk, dub, electronica, and all points in between—and all in just 44 boundless minute. The quintet’s devilish defiance becomes clear from the jump, as the opening track, “Seneca,” explodes into a noisy rumble that suggests Hendrix at Woodstock. But then Herndon and John McEntire lock into a staggering rhythm, as if Afrobeat played by John Bonham had been cut and built into dance-floor heat. By the end of six minute, that beat is only the foundation beneath a mesmerizing prism of guitar line, keyboard whorl, and hard handclap. Elsewhere on <i>Standards</i>, the anxious gloom of “Benway” opens into vibraphone beauty, and closes again into math-rock knot, as tight as the muscle around a trigger point. And “Six Pack” balances krautrock insistence and haze with Grant Green guitar—an intercontinental fantasy of what instrumental rock could be. <i>Standards</i> was syncretic in a way that most other bands dared not to dream. .

via Apple Music

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