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The best albums become places. They transport you instantly. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life is a joyful kitchen on a Sunday morning. Patti Smith’s Horses is a slammed New York club on a Saturday night. Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska is, well, Nebraska. Touch, the eighth studio LP from Tortoise and their first in nine years, also creates a place, but that place is nowhere at all. Recorded in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, Tortoise‘s Touch feels like the space between places; it is an alien, nighttime world. The record, like a Tolkien novel, conjures a universe and makes you feel like you’ve been there. It is, in a word, miraculous.

Humble in its concepts, minimalist in its execution, and pristinely recorded by drummer and producer John McEntire, Touch eschews the ambition and grandiosity of many post-rock LPs and focuses on simple structures. Each song tries to do only one thing; the result is ten fully coherent ideas that urge you to listen closely for each small detail. Each track is immediately distinct from the one that came before, creating a sense of unfamiliarity in the first few bars. The sounds are otherworldly but become comfortable quickly, so the slow changes feel monumental.

Take “Axial Surmount”, which chugs anxiously in C major for two full minutes, the bass and drums in lockstep. At the midway point, the track shifts suddenly, without a signal, to D minor. The same groove becomes sinister, justifying the nervousness of the opening segment. When returning to C for the track’s conclusion, the groove feels like home, but quickly fades out in favor of thirty seconds of spectral synthesizer that is sharply cut off. In four minutes, Tortoise establishes a sense of home, rips it away, restores it, and ends with a riddle. It is confounding and delightful.

These minimalist shifts are not only in service of mystique; while Touch is dark, it is still playful. The album opener, “Vexations”, concludes when the drums abandon a straightforward groove in favor of something more syncopated. The synthesizer matches it. The guitar complements the synth, and then the bass matches them all, forming a deliriously joyful, off-kilter lockstep, much like “Axial Surmount”, before deteriorating into a question.

Touch‘s finest moment comes in its closing track, “Night Gang”, a stately march. It sits in one groove for several minutes and then changes keys just a half step. The band takes this change nonchalantly; the drums don’t add a fill to signal the transition, and there’s no excited guitar run. All we get is a fuzzy synthesizer, emerging from the darkness and gently warming up, to push us into the new key. The track, now slightly brighter, bears an air of triumph. Barely anything has changed, but the song is completely reborn. When the song deteriorates and the album walks away from us, we are transformed.

Tortoise haven’t made an album in nine years. If you’re going to wait this long, you should make something like Touch: A cinematic record that is profoundly human and entirely spectral. It is a world unto itself, filled with beautiful landmarks and perplexing questions. Our own world is more interesting because it is finally here.

There’s a lot of dirt in the gears: distortion, static and other distressed sounds. That might be illustrative: The band members—Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Douglas McCombs, McEntire, and Parker, multi-instrumentalists all—have variously noted the album’s difficult, lengthy, sometimes frustrating creation. Logistics made it the first long-distance Tortoise album, one not centered on folks making music together in a room. There are moments you sense that detached process, an airlessness that flattens some details. It rarely lasts long: One instrument or another will make a grand gesture, or get punched up in the mix Lee Perry-style, pushed through a filter and/or into the red. The destructive energy in some of the creative decisions speak to the detachment of the recording process—a shouting over the transom—and it makes for a less comforting, more unstable record.

“Promenade à deux” finally eases into something like a classic Tortoise chill-out space, albeit with a more widescreen approach, uncharacteristically graced by viola and cello. From there, beginning with “A Title Comes,” the LP’s second half finds perfect balance between signal noise and cinematic sweep, with signature vibraphone pulses and swooning guitar progressions rubbing against blissed-out Terry Riley organ tones and motorik chug. The interstitial “Rated OG,” which might easily run double its length without losing steam, hurtles into a splatter groove, tag-teaming “Oganesson,” which maintains the propulsion, locking focus with a spidery bass line that ends with another plunge into gritty discord.

“Night Gang” is the big finale. It opens like an abstracted Shangri-Las ballad, but vocals never come. There are self-consciously anthemic synths and super-sized surf guitar that suggest David Lynch directing Ben-Hur, and the song goes out on a tease of lighters-up rock-god jamming just before the fade. It’s pretty funny, actually, and moving, too. You sense the in-jokes, the teenage pleasures dusted-off and sincerely lensed through distance and accrued wisdom. You feel the miles and styles these guys have traversed over 30-plus years of music making. And while the darkness of the record’s first half doesn’t get resolved, the frame has widened and you see the bigger picture. There’s some comfort in that.

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Tortoise

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Tortoise: Touch Album Review | Pitchfork