Standards is the fourth studio album by American post-rock band Tortoise. It was released on Thrill Jockey in 2001.
Production Tortoise's previous albums had been recorded in the original, smaller Soma studio, which was eventually moved to another location. Soma's new location boasted a larger live room which had enough space for all members of the band to play together and thus, according to Jeff Parker, allowed them to "experiment with the acoustics of the space" more than on previous releases. Tortoise initially recorded demos of the songs, then played a handful of shows in Chicago, Madison, Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and Champaign, Illinois in order to "come up with new ideas from playing the songs live every night, and to give it a little more energy." The album was then recorded onto tape and edited on the studio computer "if needed."
The album was produced using less of the studio manipulation that had been employed on previous records.
According to John McEntire, many of the songs, such as "Eden 2" and "Eden 1", had their start in the sessions for their previous album, TNT. "Firefly" segues from a studio recording of the track into a version recorded during a band practice.
Critical reception
The A.V. Club wrote that "the band is poised between capturing a momentary, malleable inspiration and shaping that moment into some timeless anthem, and as always, it chooses to dither and delay, settling for a sometimes pleasant, sometimes maddening, almost always stimulating exploration of atmospherics." Entertainment Weekly called the album "mood music for post-post-moderns, both forward- and backward-looking." Spin deemed it "a cohesion of styles and impulses so tight we might call it originality." The New Zealand Herald called Standards "a neatly intriguing, mish-mash of instrumental rock shot through with lopsided grooves, dreamy drones, not-quite-jazz percussion and vibes, and knob-twiddling electronica rubbing up against a junk-store of old instruments - all of which somehow emerges as an accessible, tuneful, structured affair."
Track listing
Personnel Sourced from Bandcamp.
Tortoise Jeff Parker - guitar, bass Dan Bitney - bass, guitar, percussion, vibes, marimba, keyboards, baritone saxophone Douglas McCombs - bass, bass 6, guitar, lap steel John Herndon - drums, vibes, keyboards, sequencing John McEntire - drums, modular synthesizer, ring modulator guitar, electric harpsichord, keyboards
Charts Chart Peakposition UK Albums (OCC) 95 US Billboard 200 200 US Independent Albums (Billboard) 10
References
External links