I was riding the Chicago L at 6:30 in the morning on a Sunday. The weather was cool with no rain or humidity. A friend-- we'll call him "Joe"-- had pointed me in the right direction, so I was now on the Blue Line "to Forest Park" at Damen. I was headed to the loop so I could switch over to the Orange Line for Midway.
The sun was up, but was hidden behind the long row of buildings that stood there as if they were just people made of buildings. There were three other passengers in the car, each probably writing his or her own record review. Mine was to be about the first solo recording by Eleventh Dream Day/ Tortoise/ For Carnation guy Doug McCombs. My first concern was whether to call it a solo project or new band. Was it really a solo effort? He had quite a few people playing with him. But he wrote all the songs... I finally ended up deciding on "solo effort," at about the same time that I arrived at the Monroe stop and exited the train.
At this point, I needed to make my way through the city for a few blocks. I remembeOrange back to the first time I heard Tortoise. I bought their first album in the summer of 1994, along with Girls Against Boys' Cruise Yourself, Ida's Tales of Brave Ida, and Liz Phair's Whip Smart. I didn't really get a chance to listen to the records until I was on an airplane headed towards Ireland, where I would spend the next year. Tortoise ended up making its way to my discman one night while I was busy trying to keep warm using three blankets and a hot water bottle (the Irish didn't really believe in insulating their buildings). The music filled the darkness of my room but, at the same time, left me with a feeling of moroseness and wonder. What struck me most was the bass-- it didn't play rhythms. It spoke. It walked around the room, leaned against the door, then danced to the window. It was Doug McCombs. Well, okay, it was also Bundy K. Brown, but for review purposes, we'll stick to McCombs.
With Brokeback, McCombs is free to let his bass walk us through his version of the Chicago post-rock music scene. Releasing this album automatically relegated all his previous bands to side- project status. It gave us a blueprint mapping essentially what Doug "Puffy" McCombs brings to these other bands: the empty ambiance filled by plucked strings; the simple driving melodies that wander from your speakers without settling anywhere in particular.
Hunger and my bag were weighing heavily as I climbed the stairway to the Jackson stop on the Orange Line. I pulled out a bag of peanuts that I'd stashed during my flight in to Chicago. Perfect. Eggs would have been better, but hey, protein is protein. I got out my discman as the Midway train approached, putting the Brokeback disc in for my trip down the line.
I fell in and out of sleep with the music on my headset as the train made its trip to Midway. Here was the same sense of space that defined the first Tortoise album. The sounds were sparse and ethereal-- distant, yet close. Most of the tracks on Field Recordings are comprised of simple six- string bass and brushed drum accompaniment due to McCombs' minimalist approach to arranging. On "A Blueprint," the drums are even forgone by John McEntire for a simple triangle.
Mary Hanson of Stereolab makes a guest appearance on "The Great Banks," a tune that answers (and is basically the same melody as) "Along the Banks of Rivers," the last track off Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die. While the Tortoise version is the slowest and most drifting track on that album, the McCombs version is lighter still-- music from a spaghetti western using whistling and la-la-ing to carry the main melody as the track slowly works through its five minutes.
McCombs also uses sound effects to give the album a sense of place. I woke up during "The Wilson Ave. Bridge at the Chicago River, 1953" thinking that I was sitting on a garbage barge on Long Island Sound as seagull and tern chirps surrounded me. (Although, I guess I was probably supposed to be somewhere near the Wilson Avenue Bridge. Oops.) Putting the song in a setting like this lifts the bass- driven instrumental into the atmosphere, placing its sound outside the studio and in the air as if it were a soundtrack to your existence. And at this time, it had indeed become the soundtrack to my ride in the third car of a Orange Line train heading towards Midway Airport on the South Side of Chicago.
