Touch

Between 1994 and 2001, this Tortoise released four albums that had critics scouring thesauruses for superlatives to praise their skills as composers, musicians and trailblazers who helped define the then-recently coined "post-rock" genre.The Chicago quintet's subsequent output was a bit more slow-moving, due in part to demands placed on the individual members as musicians and engineers in a variety of other projects. Those albums — including their last until now, 2016's The Catastrophist — still had a spirit of experimentation, but were greeted by most with a sense of renovation rather than innovation.Though it's their first record in nine years, Touch is a project that's been assembled slowly and painstakingly over the last four, according to the band's press materials. Finding themselves geographically disparate between Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland presented a scenario where sessions were either conducted remotely or occasionally when there was time and space for Tortoise to come together. This piecemeal methodology is definitely not an alien concept for a band whose second album, 1996's Millions Now Living Will Never Die, featured a 21-minute opening track titled "Djed" that was cut and pasted together into an elegant Frankenstein out of musical chaos. Touch features its fair share of drummer and mixing engineer John McEntire's equally inspired juxtapositions.The machinery behind the music is laid out as "Vexations" opens the album with an electronic crackle, soon overtaken by a punchy 4/4 drum beat before Morricone-style desert guitars and keyboards come in to match the rhythmic gallop. Likewise, "Works and Days" wakes out of a muted guitar loop, complimented by squelchy synthesizer sounds and a relaxed samba rhythm that lazily collapses and reassembles from time to time. The wealth of percussionists in the band provides a constant rhythmic evolution, which is a major element of the album.The first true Tortoise classic comes in almost halfway through with "Promenade à deux," a mid-tempo orchestral arrangement that builds atop a low-bass rumble and both live and electronic percussion, pitting sci-fi synthesizers against dual echoing guitar washes by Jeff Parker and Doug McCombs, punctuated by Dan Bitney's signature mallet work."A Title Comes" similarly organizes many of these elements into an airy '70s soundtrack that suggests sunrises over smoggy airport runways in some urban landscape. Near the end of the album, lead single and noise-lounge banger "Oganesson" showcases the band's ability to click together any number of disparate tempos, sounds and moods, making these facets all sound like naturally occurring organisms.If Touch were the first album by a brand new band, it would likely be judged as an unequivocal triumph — but Tortoise suffer from the burden of their iconic back catalogue. What made them innovators 30 years ago has been absorbed into the lexicon of modern instrumental rock and copied (mostly poorly, but at times quite triumphantly) ever since. Perhaps eschewing their longtime home at Thrill Jockey to find a place among International Anthem's new generation of groundbreakers will open new eyes to their continued brilliance.