-- Turnstyles and Junkpiles (Thrill Jockey 55)

A Minor Forest-- Inindependence (Thrill Jockey 56)

So maybe I go off a little half-cocked sometimes.

But damn, I guess I just got a little tired of that "post-rock" word and went off on the last Tortoise album. And I’ll not take any of that back.

You’d expect Thrill Jockey to put me (and the rag that prints me) on the negative guestlist, but suddenly we get not one but two Thrill Jockey releases in the mail! Either they’s masochists, or just want to see how het up I can get.

(Or, I suspect, they just didn’t read the Tortoise review. Anyhoo, both of these are good albums and worthy of your patronage. They couldn’t be more different from each other.)

Pullman is an all-acoustic star-jam with Bundy Brown (Directions), Chris Brokaw (Come), Curtis Harvey and Doug McCombs (Tortoise). Before you start thinking, "Oh God, like one of those Tesla ‘Five Man Acoustical Jam’ things?," rest assured that none of these people has long hair or wears denim on stage. Including acid-washed denim underpants.

Turnstyles. . . is closer to Jim O’Rourke’s Bad Timing album from last year, albeit broken down into nice little three-minute chunks and without the tape manipulation. All of these pieces come off as being heartfelt, and more importantly, just plain felt... I can see these people playing and getting into the music as music, not merely getting into theories about what discrete musical unit goes where. Perfect, wholly organic music for sitting around on the back porch as you slowly fan yourself with your straw boater.

A Minor Forest come from another place, a louder place that shares a border with Spiderland. So they sound like Slint.

But whiff this: that’s not a bad thing. We just got jaded. The first song is the album in a nutshell. "The Dutch Fist" opens up with some anthemic slow-core power riffage, big ol’ drums and what sounds like doves cooing (my fave touch on the album). It goes on, gets some steam up, things get faster and louder, the tape breaks (oh, yeah, this is a Thrill Jockey release!) and they start again, finally descending into something very loud, spastic and pummeling indeed. And since this is, as I mentioned not one sentence earlier, a Thrill Jockey release, they have the requisite 18 minute long epic but the difference here is that it’s 18 minutes of the same song and not seven songs cobbled together by studio drones, a la "Djed."

Listen to it, enjoy it, smack your head about to it, and marvel at this fact: all musicians on this album are also part of a Metallica tribute band. You think Tortoise would cross the street to spit on Metallica? The fact that I (or you, possibly) wouldn’t either is barely the point. You know what I’m saying.

— T. Magill