Monolith Cocktail Blog

Album Review By Dominic Valvona

Image courtesy of Todd Weaver

Tortoise ‘Touch’
(International Anthem X Nonesuch Records) 24^th October 2025

The highly influential and many tentacled Tortoise collective have pretty much reached a pantheon status as innovators of a postmodernist fusion of influences and musical strands that includes jazz and all its many fecund offshoots, rock, the leftfield, the avant-garde and the electronic. This almost seamless if explorative and experimental embrace of “post-everything” ideas is unsurprising, for they were hot-housed in that much important cultural hub of Chicago, home to some of the most important and most influential developments and artists in the jazz, the blues, rock ‘n’ roll, dance music and hip-hop fields. Of course, there’s also that post-rock scene tag to consider, a label that has followed the group around since their inception in the early 1990s – although the story really begins back in the late 80s with founding members Douglas McCombs and drummer John Herndorn, both of which, despite some lineup changes, departures and new recruitments over the past thirty odd years, have stayed the course. 

Whether together under the Tortoise shell or apart, divided up into spin-offs and wholly sperate projects and entities (from the various versions of the Chicago Underground to Isotope 217 and Brokeback) their reach on the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries musical landscapes has been impressive. They’ve arguably created something that is there’s alone; a language and method (apparently anarchic yet egalitarian) that works for such a diverse range of musicians with experiences in an eclectic range of genres. But they’ve been apart as a group, so to speak, since the release of 2016’s The Catastrophist.

Committed however to unifying the vehicle that has proven so successful, stalwarts McCombs and Herndorn are joined by Dan Bitney, John McEntire and Jeff Parker for their eighth album, Touch. Their first album in nearly nine years is also the first album to be recorded across a tri-cities network. Previous records have been recorded more or less in the city that birthed them: Chicago. But now, members are spread across state lines, in Portland and L.A., and so there’s a new impetus and methodology of remote exchange and layering: The process has changed somewhat from the days of collectively living and creatively jamming together under one loft space roof.

They’re back, but then again, they never left, grouping as they have under various umbrellas and collaborations. For example, guitarist Parker has branched out in recent years under his own name with albums on International Anthem, one of the partners, alongside Nonesuch Records, in the co-operative label sharing enterprise behind the new Tortoise album. Just as renowned on record as they are live, fans and those who’ve yet to be drawn towards the group but who might find this latest album appealing, will be delighted to hear that there’s a whole bunch of both North American and European live dates to look forward to this year and next.

Preludes and tasters, videos and multimedia teasers have been dropped in the run up to the Touch album release – some involving recent International Anthem roster names. And so, the anticipation has been building for months. Those familiar with the treasured catalogue will find a group certainly keen to plough new sonic and musical furrows, and yet remain connected to such iconic albums as Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT.

With references to a demanding work by a love-sick and hurt Erik Satie, a submarine volcano in the Pacific and the heaviest element in the periodic table, there’s prompted doses of science, geography and the avant-garde made human with emotional pulls and swept gestures that could be called romantic. For this time around Tortoise, no matter how unique in practice, seem to be creating a certain drama and evocative sentiment on tracks like the estranged Parisian tango shimmy and classically strained ‘Promenade à deux’, and the twangy mirage Western, reframed by Sky Records, gravity defying cosmic soundtrack ‘Oganesson’ – named after the Armenian/Russian nuclear physicist and the element that has the most heavy protons and electrons on the Periodic table, atomic number 118: a synthetic element if anyone is asking, that doesn’t appear naturally on Earth and which is extremely difficult to process. The former of those two tracks features the guest strings pairing of violinist Marta Sofia Honer (readers may recall Honer’s The Closet Thing To Silence partnership last year for International Anthem with Ariel Kalma and Jeremiah Chiu, which went on to make our choice albums of 2024 list) and cellist Skip Vonkuske adding their own special something to the transmogrified Francophone vibes.

Expanding into all sorts of areas musically and sonically, the album matches The Cars with Pino Rucher and Holy Fuck on the tubular bristled, clapped and encouraged turn timpani rumbling and nicely rolled-off ‘Vexations’ – a reference to the incredibly tough one-page notation piece by Satie that calls for the pianist to repeat an instruction 840 times, and takes anywhere from 16 to 20 hours to perform; Cage, not one to put off by such trivialities of endurance and an audience’s attention, famously had a go at it -, and evokes a motorik driven sensibility of Rother and Electrelane with hints of Thomas Dinger on the electrically harped ‘Axial Seamount’ – named after the complex and still poorly understood, it’s said, Pacific Ocean submarine volcano that sits at the epicentre of the Cobb-Eickelberg Seamount chain; first discovered in the 1970s.

Many ideas are formed, all congruously converging to create something a bit different; the doorbell like chimes and lattice of tubular bells and scaffold coming together with jazz-rock and the kosmsiche, or the Techno beats of ‘Elka’ that follow on from the squirrelling 80s fusion of new wave jazz turn heavily laboured, weighted down ‘Works and Days’. ‘A Title Comes’ meanwhile, reminded me of Sven Wunder reimagining the Faust Tapes. This is what they do best, forming or transducing what could be a mess of influences, strands and experiences into something that gels and conjures up descriptions, emotions, scenes, events, science facts, chemicals, and states of the mind and the landscape. And with this latest album, the comeback that might or might not be, they continue to avoid definition. Flexing if anything and creating ever new pathways for sonic and musical exploration. This album however is filled with mood music: some that dances and is propulsive, and some that are far more lucid and sensitive. Touch is an album that I predict will grow on you and get better with each and every play. Only time will tell if it becomes one of their most endurable and lasting influential works.

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