Beacons of Ancestorship

In general, music has motion, a wide girth so to say. It pushes itself in many ways, some progressions understandable, like Kraftwerk influencing hip hop, some strange, like how Lily Allen got cool and now writes decent songs. Yes, that’s right; from Kraftwerk to Lily Allen. There is method to this madness. It’s just that, simply, most music tries to evolve through experimentation and create fresh new genres. Granted, some music doesn’t. Pop straddles the same circulatory chain while trumping up slightly varied chord patterns in a bid to detonate something original, but with all those haunting instrumental bands like Mogwai and Godspeed and here Tortoise, PROGRESSION is the name of the game.

After a good long break Tortoise have released their latest; Beacons of Ancestorship. More than a decade ago, critics were drooling over their ability to tear apart pre-conceived genres – krautrock, dub, ambient, acid jazz – and meld it into one post-rock melting pot. Their sound was an earthy low-fi one, built on engineering effects and instruments and moods all into one surging ten armed beast. There was something very, very clever and cool and frankly, brilliant about some of their stuff; 1996’s Millions Now Living… and 98’s TNT. 

Maybe it’s actually EXPERIMENTATION that’s the name of the game. Because with this latest Tortoise offering, that is actually what’s missing. It’s as if Tortoise have just got bored and fed up experimenting. Like the lonely single man, he eventually just wants to find stability and settle down. Do we have five full, fed up lonely single men finding their stability and making their homes? OK, maybe not lonely, probably not even single but definitely, it would seem, losing their creative sharpness.

Beacons of Ancestorship is not ambient in the way Brian Eno might well seduce us. Nor is it ‘the quiet before the storm’ in much the way Mogwai formulate over and over. It is not interesting enough like Efterklang or Godspeed. It is just really rather dull and boring. Northern Something and Gigantes – three and four tracks in respectively - are the best on offer here, and one of them is only two and a half minutes long. Most of the album resembles fuzzy, slappy stuff. Imagine if you will what Grizzly Bear would sound like on valium, if they kicked the singer out and were left alone with some crap Casio keyboards and a drum kit. This is by no means severe.

If instrumental post-rock, as a genre, sailed free of the continents as a mass of towering ice a hundred stories high domineering in its linear drift; then this album is the ice cube that flakes off it and disappears, weeping and dissolving into the sea amounting to nothing.