3 out of 5

Label: Thrill Jockey

Produced by: John McEntire (recorded by)

I guess there’s a bit of a to-do about the 20-minute opener, Djed, on Tortoise’s sophomore album, Millions Now Living Will Never Die.  Allmusic’s is the most outright glowing I read, but there is a general consensus on the impressiveness of the track’s morphing through various affects – krautrock, minimalist, dub, post-rock – while maintaining its core pace and tone.  And I guess that’s true.  But if you hadn’t pointed it out to me, I’d just hear a clipped, restrained beat that gets some flourish added and taken away in little sections during its third-of-an-hour runtime.  It’s a good track, yes – and I agree that the focused approach is admirable, and absolutely arrived at by dudes skilled in their craft – but it’s also not a a track I’m particularly drawn to for repeat listens.  If it comes on, it comes on.

Such is the case with the remainder of the disc, which plays, in part, as a more lively taken on the instrumental chill of Tortoise’s debut – Glass Museum and The Taut and the Tame putting pep in that harmonic, bass-driven step – and then also as an introduction to the more studio-driven trickery they’d exhibit on some later releases; the comparatively shorter A Survey and Dead Grandma and Grandma fiddle with electronic buzzing and stretches of quiet tension achieved in a nigh-guitarless void.

If there is an allstar to my ears, it’s closer Along the Banks of Rivers, which has the group at their most “live” and organic, McEntire’s production very much capturing a living room sound as Tortoise goes through a – though perhaps more typical – instrumental post-rock build and release that satisfies with a fully considered structure that some of the other tracks lack.