Tortoise: Standards : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The title suggests both a measure of excellence and songs that have entered the performance canon. The five hipsters in Tortoise probably would reject those definitions - and, to be honest, Standards doesn't attain either one. Still, these ten instrumentals flirt with structure more intently - if no less elliptically - than Tortoise have in the past. "Blackjack" even sounds like the lost theme from an imaginary spaghetti western. What finally rescues this album from the graveyard of cerebral noodling is rhythm. If the keyboard, guitar and marimba lines typically dissolve before cohering into melody, the bass and drums beneath them - and, at times, above them - are always moving and shifting. Even at their most ethereal, as on the synthetic meditation that opens "Benway," Tortoise don't become fully unmoored. That sense of grounding - which never solidifies into rhythmic cliches - allows Tortoise to explore abstraction without seeming bloodless. To be smart and original, playful and provocative - those are the standards Tortoise really aspire to, and that they achieve here as ingeniously as ever. (RS 863)

ANTHONY DeCURTIS