"The Source of Uncertainty" is dance music played on empty tin cans and Coke bottles dangling from twine, abandoning the good stuff kids go for like hooks and melody and drawing lines between then-current jungle's polyrhythmic motion and shit like Can, This Heat, and Miles' On the Corner. Much of Tortoise's material from this era has a slight drum'n'bass feel, twisted just enough to avoid dating itself. The bass modulates constantly between rhythm and melody, one of the band's favorite tricks. A beat somewhere between the funky drummer break and Neu! builds and crests for a small eternity, finding room for both country twang and Edge-like harmonics. "Gamera" begins with John Fahey-esque picking so intimate you can hear the squeak of fingers on the frets. At their best Tortoise were either anthemic or hypnotic the first disc of Lazarus opens with 1995's "Gamera", which hits the anthemic/hypnotic axis dead center and is still the band's high point and American post-rock's most epic 11 minutes. The wide-eared listening habits Tortoise helped to foster remain active in 2006, but it's hard to imagine a sweaty, bearded Dan Bitney striding across the stage in a stained babydoll dress any more than John McEntire changing his name to Moonchild McFlowerpot or Koala Bear.Īnd though bookish indie heartthrobs can now make a mint singing about the Cook County chamber of commerce over Steve Reich pastiches, Tortoise offered no such easy ins. Onstage in 1996 on the DVD, the band locks into its intricate, multi-part music with the implacable faces of tenured calculus professors. In fact, A Lazarus Taxon is an inadvertent lesson in how indie rock has changed in the last 10 years. Tortoise continue to tour and release records, of course, but in many ways they remain emblematically tied to the mid- to late-1990s, a time when indie rock remixes were a real mind blower and everyone was scrimping for their own marimba. Wrapped in beautiful grayscale, the box has a definite, if unfortunate, tombstone vibe. So here we are a decade later with A Lazarus Taxon, a 3xCD/DVD box set collecting singles, B-sides, and remixes originally created between 19. Premature and bullshit in retrospect, of course, but excuse us for getting excited. Two years later, it was hard not to feel like the band's Millions Now Living Will Never Die- and a billion other things- had finally killed grunge dead. When the odd, oblong, bass-forward grooves of Tortoise dropped in 1994, Kurt Cobain had recently, uh, retired. For a few insane years people were actually arguing that the song should be left for dead.īack then, Tortoise appeared on comps like Headz 2 and Macro Dub Infection, surrounded by jungle, techno, and trip-hop artists. Like most hip-hop artists, Tortoise put groove and texture out front- and groove and texture were a lot of listener's primary obsessions in the 1990s. What might seem like craziness on the surface is actually a perfectly logical statement. In a 2004 The Village Voice review of the group's It's All Around You, Jeff Chang called Tortoise a hip-hop band.