A couple of years ago, someone unearthed and posted a number of drum tracks from the recording sessions to Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door. Running about 29 minutes and given the name "The John Henry Bonham Files", the tracks isolated the technique of one of rock's most versatile and powerful drummers: "Moby Dick" proved Bonham could solo, but it was rare to hear him just lay down the rhythm unencumbered by the rest of the band. As a scrap of music history, it's fascinating, but as an album it's not something you'd want to sit around listening to for more than about five minutes-- with nothing but the drums, you start missing Jimmy Page's guitar and Robert Plant's vocals and, hell, even John Paul Jones' synthesizer.
So if Bonzo couldn't carry a half hour's worth of recorded material on his own, how could Tortoise's three percussionists pull it off? Apparently, their side project has a specific extra-musical intent: Bumps' debut has been calculated to serve a purpose as a breakbeat record of sorts, which goes a little way towards explaining its appearance on the hip-hop-centric Stones Throw label. And it makes a certain kind of sense, depending on how much it'd cost to farm these out to producers. Samples aren't exactly like fossil fuels-- they're not finite, for one thing-- but they do share the quality of being a lot more expensive than they used to be, and there's been a decade-plus groundswell of visionaries who've spent a lot of time developing inexpensive alternatives. Tortoise are one of post rock's most culturally omnivorous bands, so their percussive core-- consisting of Dan Bitney, John Herndon, and John McEntire-- seem like a good fit for a project like this.
Bumps caters extensively to the sample-using demographic's core musical tendencies, with many of its 23 tracks couched in a number of different rhythmic contexts that fit almost every imaginable dance groove. And with nothing but the beat present, it's easy to imagine these rhythms slotted into multiple contexts. The conga and woodblock-augmented freight-train rattle of "A Safe Balm" could equally pass for afrobeat or the chase theme from a 1970s action film soundtrack. "Fun Injury" captures a lot of big beat's Northern Soul frenzy, but with a bit of judicious cutting and splicing it could also work like a version of jungle's "Amen" break turned inside-out. And it's anybody's guess as to who'd be the first to snatch up the bass-drum 4/4 boom of "Biotic Discussion": A one-man indie-punk bedroom producer piecing together a pastiche of his favorite A Certain Ratio songs, or a house producer-slash-disco revivalist hooked on recapturing that early 1980s West End Records feel. (Either way, they'd both benefit.)
Most of the tracks ride on a malleable percussive tautness, usually starting with a deceptively simple figure and then rounding things out with some additional fills or transitions. And their timbre tends to range from subdued, almost drum machine-esque flatness ("Craven") to teeming walls of tight-wound bass ("Dawn at Dawn") to creaking, aluminum-echo-chamber dub ("A Dumb Month"). It's clear that they've accounted for all kinds of production styles and aesthetics for their potential usage as loops; "Bin Johnston" sounds clean and resilient enough for radio-ready neo-soul, while "Can You See?" pushes things so abrasively into the red that only the most junkyard-aesthetic corners of indie rap could comfortably rock over it.
Unfortunately, this isn't just a breakbeat mine-- it's a record, and as a release aimed at the everyday consumer it doesn't provide the most substantial or satisfying experience. As tight and as professional as everything sounds, it's still hard to shake the feeling that this sounds like a demo track from some unfinished sessions. While a few of the tracks stand on their own as likeable diversions and would probably sound interesting coming out of nowhere in a 3,500-song shuffle, there's enough stylistic redundancy and a deliberate sense of unfinished composition (nearly half the tracks are less than 90 seconds, and all but one are 2:02 or shorter) to make listening to it beginning to end the epitome of pointlessness. Some records sound good on a shitty old boombox, and some are most easily appreciated on an expensive hi-fi system with an audiophile turntable, but Bumps is an oddity: album that doesn't really sound its best unless you're patching it through an SP-1200.
