Tortoise-- TNT

(Thrill Jockey 50)

Boy, Post-rock really fell flat on its ass, now din't it?

Which, of course, pisses me off because that was pretty much my critical wheelhouse, if'n I have one. I feel like Vaughan Meader the day after JFK was shot. I was the apologist. While everyone else hooted and hollered, I calmly sipped the Miller High Life I loved because it connected me to the blue-collar Joe and patiently explained that it was all about blah blah blah so shut it, here's where the white, cardigan-wearing, Baffler-reading turntablists come in. Although even I couldn't come up with a good reason it was called 'post-rock'. I suspect we can thank the English for that.

So anyway, the last Gastr del Sol album pretty much blows, the solo Jim O'Rourke album is straight-up rock without prefixes and everybody else has embraced the silicon God. So the fad is reeling and who should come along but Tortoise, and post-rock looks up from the gutter because Tortoise'll save 'em, pump some life-blood back into it and then they can both start working on seriously wow-ing the French.

We found "post-rock" buried in a shallow grave a couple of days later, face drawn in a rictus of serious and pathetic self-contemplation. Cause of death was this CD jammed through its spine, which at first looked like a Windham Hill compilation but turned out to be the new Tortoise album. Man! How's that for a plot twist?

Everyone who dislikes the genre can finally point to one CD and say, now that's what's wrong with this academic theory shit. Because this album is as cold and soulless as they come. You give me a choice as to whether I can have a band that loves music or a band that knows music inside and out and I'm gonna take the former anytime. Kind of like choosing 'the rest of life' over 'staying in college'.

There ain't a lick of fun anywhere on this thing! They could use it at dentists' offices! I wasn't the biggest fan of their last album but at least they dorked around at being Stereolab for a coupla minutes!

Guess what they're dorking around with this time? Fusion! Depending on who you talk to. Someone I know called it "new age" and there was absolutely nothing I could say. Even the bits where they're sounding like Session Musicians Local 665 don't sound like any big shakes because they sound like, natch, Stereolab. Or The Future Sound of Grad School. So damn serious! I play this at work all day and the blue-hairs and heiresses and bond-salesmen bellying up for high-scale eats like watercress vichysoisse raise nary an eyebrow. You know what that means? Aural wallpaper. Always thought I wouldn't mind acquiring an album of Weather Channel jazz if only for the funny-ha-ha ironic effect. How wrong was I?

So, the backlash starts here, except for the fact that it probably has been going in high gear for a year in NME. The English know how to have fun in their music journalism. They write rants like this every two weeks (the average shelf-life of trends like "Deep Brit-Pop," "intelligent herbal beats" and "Jagjaguwar" in the Motherland).

And. . . if you're like me, you'll forget about post-rock, you'll leave the marimbas in the Caribbean and you'll start listening to nothing but old They Might Be Giants twenty-four hours a day. Now that's smart rock.

T.Magill