21 November 2008 :: Fortunately, Buckethead.

:: Record Review

Tortoise

A Lazarus Taxon Box
(Thrill Jockey; 2006)

Rating: 83%

I started to review A Lazarus Taxon, Tortoise’s first stab at a retrospective box set, with the idea that what makes it such a worthwhile purchase is its value relative to its cost, but this is actually harder than I had anticipated. The collectors/fetishists among my friends tend to think of the value of music as something independent of its monetary cost, sometimes even relishing the purchase of ten songs on German import for what it says about their dedication to being a completist, willingness to sacrifice for good music, etc. Music blogs and websites rarely mention the approximate cost of an album, though to do so might greatly influence or diminish its appeal. And yet, the first and best reason I can give you to purchase A Lazarus Taxon is that, for about thirty bucks, you get thirty three (long) songs, including the long out-of-print remix album Rhythms, Resolutions & Clusters (1995) (which would probably run you the cost of this entire box on Ebay) and a DVD of rare performances and (unintentionally) rare music videos. That should place this box on your radar even before reading the rest of this review.

A Lazarus Taxon is an interesting, worthwhile, but I’ll admit inessential way to reflect on the last twelve years of Chicago’s most well known instrumental post-rock act. I say inessential primarily because any box set, even one far more exhaustive than this, could never capture the self-enclosed sounds of an individual Tortoise album, or communicate how big of a step Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1996) really was from Tortoise (1994), or TNT (1998) from Millions and so on. Barring being a Complete Studio Recordings-style document, A Lazarus Taxon really had no hope of replacing the experience of listening to single Tortoise efforts, and so instead opts to collect the harder to find moments of Tortoise’s varied discography and adds them to remixed and reconstituted album tracks, still familiar but not wholly recognizable in their new formats. You may have heard that you should listen to “Djed,” and you should, but it’s not here.

The production on the first and second discs runs Tortoise’s gamut from dub to electronics-inspired, and the music from traditional indie to avant-garde jazz. It’s a cliffy terrain, one difficult to organize into both chronological and listenable, flowing chunks, and the first disc can suffer slightly for its wild unwieldiness. It opens with early 7” single “Gamera”, in all of its gorgeous, morphing, building, duel-drummer rhythm, a song still representative of Tortoise’s sound, tied heavily to the mid-nineties and completely unafraid to stretch its primary groove well past the ten-minute mark. The robot funk of “Sexual for Elizabeth”, Duke Ellington cover “Didjeridoo” and remix of Yo La Tengo’s “Autumn Sweater” are also highlights, the latter a fuzzy, hyper-melodic interlude to the first disc’s often stark and jagged duration. But Autechre’s mix of “To Day Retrieval” contributes to the first disc’s inability to sustain itself as a continuous mix, and the simple prettiness of a flute sample on “Restless Waters” is complicated by its slot between rock and hard place “A Grape Dope” and “Vaus”; to this point A Lazarus Taxon feels very much like a compilation of disconnected material, assembled into an enormous, fascinating oddity, and a demanding listen.

Where A Lazarus Taxon thrives is its second disc, a collection that, though perhaps unintentionally, plays as a brilliant mix both smoothly interdependent and full of surprising distinctions. Nobukazu Takemura’s jazzy reinterpretation of “TNT” is a wonder to listen to, a polished and varied discovery of the melodies beneath the original’s Neu!-like emphasis on polyrhythms. Multi-voiced epic “Cliff Dweller Society” acts as both a climax to the disc and to the box as a whole, horn section swelling over a hurricane’s eye of noise and a counterbalancing, eerie calm. “Why We Fight” and “Gojiri,” again culled from 7”, are resolute and charming, intensely effective combinations of groove and texture that demand second (and third) listens. Though using the same technique of bricolage as the first disc, here the box becomes much more amenable, less Fans Only.

Disc three is comprised entirely of the excellent (and still highly listenable eleven years after its release) Rhythms, Resolutions & Clusters remix album which, at less than forty minutes, seems startlingly short after the box’s first two juggernauts. (Perhaps highlights from 1996’s Remixed might have made an appearance here as well.) Originally released after their debut, RR&C hardly scrapes the surface of the band’s panoramic sound, even with the assembled minds of Steve Albini, Brad Wood and Jim O’Rourke. Ironically, though reinterpretations, because of its narrow source material it may provide a more informed document of a certain period in the band’s timeline than anything else to be found in A Lazarus Taxon.

The DVD is less successful for its obvious insistence that you sit and watch distracted projects that refuse to provide a clear shot of the band performing or tie a coherent narrative to songs that lend themselves quite naturally to soundtracking. Though “Salt the Skies” is a high-quality music video, many of the others are stock, thematic footage of computers, rocketry, numbers -- a freshman’s conflation of angular jargon and foreign, independently operating technology with the band’s mechanically precise performances. It’s an odd gesture made more apparent by the videos being placed side by side: the directors of Tortoise’s videos seem to be telling the viewer that the band’s music is alienating, cold, inhuman, though there is plenty of evidence in this box to say otherwise. Useful as a capture of how post-rock may have been perceived at the time of its mid-nineties peak, the DVD sidesteps the otherwise celebratory nature of A Lazarus Taxon’s inclusiveness, and are simply not very much fun to watch. The live performances are an oscillation between similarly angular and maddeningly unfocused video recordings of fantastic performances and fantastically focused and professional recordings of sterile festival performances; particularly frustrating is “Live in Toronto, 1996,” which opens with a now-familiar grey scale David Pajo plucking away at “Gamera” and losing you before the song has even built. In places it looks as if it were filmed from the audience on a cell phone. “Live at Deutches Jazz Festival, 1999” presents the DVD’s, and the band’s, flip side: a portrayal of Tortoise impressively comfortable sharing a stage with jazz musicians and performing for jazz fans. A polar opposite of the Toronto concert, the audience is rarely in view, and polite applause replaces the hooting and bar’s background noise. Finally appended is Tortoise’s single song contribution to the Burn to Shine DVD series, which features different artists performing in a condemned house hours before its destruction. A Lazarus Taxon’s DVD has the feel of an obligation, and though it might have been a worthwhile addition as a live audio CD, has few redeeming moments as a viewing experience though it teems with material.

Overflowing with ideas both good and so-so, sounds both close to and far from where the band sits a dozen years later, A Lazarus Taxon is difficult to understand as an edifice or a testament. It’s even more nonsensical as a clinical snapshot of the band’s history, containing nearly as many remixes (of others by Tortoise and of Tortoise by others) and covers as it does original compositions. Even its liner notes are written in multiple languages, opting for polyphony over consensus, varied interpretation of source material over more source material. And under those expectations, I admit that the box might not deliver. But as a broad, detailed collection of excellent, haunting, scarily tight, otherwise expensive, cross-genre soundscapes, there’s simply no denying that as a music consumer there’s little else this year that can compete with the sheer volume of music available here. Conrad Amenta :: 31 October 2006 |                

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