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Tortoise!

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TheFuriousWombat:

--- Quote from: greenMonkey on 16 Nov 2006, 07:25 ---I can do other things and appreciate the subtleties of music at the same time.? Plus, if you miss something, you'll discover it later, and so continue to find the music interesting as opposed to hearing it once and then hearing the same thing every time you play it.

I do need to check out DMST though.? Sadly it probably won't happen for a while unless I download some because I have a huge list of albums that I need to buy and I am no where near getting through that.

--- End quote ---

subtleties can definetly be appreciated if you're doing other stuff and listening at the same time. i'm the first to defend that statement. i just have a strange routine when it comes to getting new albums in thier entierty. i know i'd pick up the subtleties anyway, but it's a habit and i'm vaugely ocd and don't like changing my habits, heh.

pat101:
I haven't heard ANY DMST anywhere in particular I should start?

öde:
When I want to check out an album I focus on it, otherwise I can't form an opinion on it.

"Did you like The Crane Wife"
"If you don't put a question mark I'm not answering"
"Did you like The Crane Wife?"
"Uh, yeah"
"Which track was your favourite?"
"Um, I think I liked the one near the beginning"

*Sights*:
The one track one their website is good enough to start off:

http://www.southern.com/southern/band/DOMAK/CST25.php

ScrambledGregs:
New-Guy-Semi-Bump

Long winded music critic style post, ho!!

Tortoise, Tortoise, Tortoise. I love Tortoise for reasons even I can't fathom. It would just be as easy to say "I love them because they're boring" and stop there, but I don't actually think they're boring. I fully acknowledge the reasons why others don't like them, but damnit if I still don't love them.

Their first album took me a long time to get into. It's much more minimalist, slow, and ambient than their other albums. I can definitely see why so many people were using the label post-rock even back then, because way back in '94, there wasn't anything that sounded like it. Sure, sure, Talk Talk and Slint. But on their own, neither Talk Talk nor Slint sound much like Tortoise.

Millions Now Living Will Never Die is the album that made me fall in love with Tortoise. 'Djed' is astonishing, especially coming from the background that I did. A 20-minute track that keeps my interest all the way through?? Not only that, but I think 'Along The Banks of Rivers' is one of the best 'album ending tracks' I've ever heard. I often use it to wrap up mixes, particularly if they have a melancholy or cinematic vibe to them.

TNT is a hard one to figure. I vacillate between loving it and finding it overlong and ponderous. Seeing as how Jeff Parker had joined the band, and came from a jazz background, TNT has a more jazzy feel than other Tortoise albums, yet it's also more experimental and more clinical at the same time.

To this day I think I will maintain that Standards is the best Tortoise album. 'Seneca' is a hell of a way to start an album, and is one of the noisiest things they've ever done. If TNT was the jazzy album, and their debut was the ambient album, then Standards is the techno album. Does anyone else think that 'Monica' sort of sounds like Daft Punk?? At any rate, Standards was the first Tortoise album I bought, but that doesn't account for my love for it, since I didn't start to love Tortoise until I got Millions.

I resisted buying It's All Around You for well over two years because of the mixed reviews it had gotten. I kept asking myself, do I really want more of the same?? Sure, I love Tortoise, but there's so many other albums I'd rather have. When I saw it used at my local record store, I snatched it up....and, I really like it. If this were released at any other time in the band's history, it wouldn't have gotten any of the criticism that it has. I realize that sounds stupid, but taken OUT OF the context of Tortoise's discography, these are great songs: 'Stretch (You Are All Right)' is addictive in the same way that good old 'Ry Cooder' was; I love the way that 'Unknown' slowly builds to the noisy, drum driven 'Dot/Eyes'; I think 'Salt The Skies' is the perfect closer to a underrated album.

The new box set is great, though I would only recommend it to hardcore fans. Tortoise has a remix artist's point of view on their own songs--by this I mean most of the b-sides, outtakes, and singles are wholly or partially made up of snippets of songs you've already heard on their albums. Of course the third disc is the 'Rhythms, Resolutions, and Clusters' remix EP, which makes their first album even more ambient than it already was, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your taste. My only complaint is that the DVD is underwhelming. There is a great 30 minute-ish live set of Tortoise floating around YouTube, which I thought would be included on here because it looks professionally done, but it's not. IMO the footage from the jazz festival circa '98 on the DVD is crap, and their performance of 'Senenca' while clearly miming in ape costumes is not as funny as it sounds. Oh well.

/long winded music critic style post

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