Standards

Tortoise have finally integrated their influences and discovered how to do more than mimic...

Throughout Standards, Tortoise takes the listener on mini-journeys into sound that alternately shimmer, contort, seduce, and confound...

Standards is disarmingly stunning and instantaneously consuming. Tortoise are unquestionably skilled artisans, electrocuting the framework for the typical rock song and reconstructing the fragments into a wonderfully surrealist space mission soundtrack.

If you value surehandedness, richness, immaculate timing and the occasional tilted eyebrow then there's a lot to enjoy on Tortoise's most assured set to date. [#204, p.65]

A thing of strange beauty, with melodies and sensations slipping in and out of focus. [2/23/01, p.163]

Standards is a mature work in the best sense, an example of a rock band--yes, a rock band--that has grown into its sound and is now relaxed enough to have fun with it. [#4, p.107]

Ultimately, Standards is Tortoise's Fragile or Hot Rats -- the sort of successful artwork that tells you a band's concept is peaking.

Overall, Standards has a few detours for fans conscious of any band's "progression," but plenty of interesting songs and great musicianship for less vested listeners. Though it doesn't develop the evocative or impressionistic side of Tortoise (as heard on TNT), the band is certainly as inventive as ever

The influence of recent collaborators like Autechre and Spring Heel Jack is prevalent throughout much of the album as tracks like 'Eros' fuse jazzy, organic instrumentation like marimbas and guitar to colder cut-up beats.

More tightly structured than their last outing TNT, this has enough dizzy polyrhythms and craziness for the free jazzers but is chock full of tunes, good humour and a certain grooviness

Standards succeeds by making the most of the intellectual side of Tortoise--their stylistic cross-pollinations, their meta-musical analyses--without ever losing sight of the music's ability to do more than engage the mind. [March 2001, p.94]

So even as Tortoise integrate guitar surrealism and edgier motifs into their palette, they also progress their unique relationship to electronic music and hip-hop. [#82, p.139]

It's somewhere between the album we've been waiting for Eno to release since 'My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts' and the album we wish Phish would stop releasing altogether. [Apr 2001, p.154]

What finally rescues this album from the graveyard of cerebral noodling is rhythm.

The jazz leanings and fascination with electronic music remain, and are sometimes imprudently indulged, but in general the band seems to have a renewed awareness of the needs of the people on the other side of the speakers.

It's surprisingly gentle, allowing the emotional context of a soundtrack or accompaniment rather than the vacuum-packed, controlled conditions art of their last album.

Given that Tortoise's previous recordings have spawned a procession of remixes and re-imaginings, is Standards to be judged on its own merits, or as the raw material for music yet to come? As always, the band is poised between capturing a momentary, malleable inspiration and shaping that moment into some timeless anthem, and as always, it chooses to dither and delay, settling for a sometimes pleasant, sometimes maddening, almost always stimulating exploration of atmospherics.

The only obvious goal seems to be shorter, more direct songs, delivered with more straightforward demeanor.