posted: 2024-04-06 It’s All Around You Tortoise

Only in the post-Britpop dead zone of the late 1990s could Tortoise’s arrival have been so celebrated. The Chicago group funnelled jazz, krautrock and dub into intricate, expansive instrumentals known as post-rock. Tellingly dubbed math-rock in America, it was dauntingly cerebral, fond of tricky time signatures and breath-taking pretentiousness. One Tortoise track was called “In Sarah, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Women And Men,” which could never be confused with a Hives song title.

These days, Tortoise are very much a fringe proposition – and that’s no bad thing. It’s All Around You is a work of elegant, unhurried subtlety, shorn of the group’s more pompous excesses, if also some of their muscle. Tortoise’s rhythm section has never sounded so restrained – “Stretch (You Are All Right)” resembles heavily sedated funk, and only the final track, “Salt the Skies,” breaks a sweat. Somewhere between an entrancing soundtrack and dithering incidental music from 1970s TV, It’s All Around You has moments of lambent beauty and times when you forget it’s playing. However, its highlights, especially the airy flutters of “The Lithium Stiffs,” have a gently persuasive power.

Dorian Lynskey, The Guardian