Standards is the most befitting title Chicago’s post-rock pioneers, Tortoise, imprinted on their fifth full-length album, released this month on Thrill Jockey.
At once embracing every essence of the title and contradicting it in the self-same performance of Standards, Tortoise remain true to their characteristically whimsical brand of instrumental indie-rock now known as “post-rock,” which they concocted throughout the nineties.

Here, as always, Tortoise let their instruments do the talking, or singing rather, and, as always, there’s a lot more to their sound than just drums, bass, and a guitar or two. Ever-present are the many strange analogue bleeps and warbles, drum machines, endlessly looped samples, xylophones, marimbas, heavily affected and pristine guitars, and god knows what else they use to compile their jazz/dub/electronica/lounge-spiced ditties.

“Seneca” opens Standards explosively with an epic-length drum solo overlaid with the slow, fuzzed-out pluckings of a heavily reverbed guitar, giving way two minutes later to an infectious drum beat and bass groove, over which a jazzy guitar, vibrating keyboards, sampled beats, and otherworldly sounds swarm in abnormal harmony.

This is as close as Tortoise comes to a formula for their music. The tight, yet unexpected, rhythms pounded out to a catching bass line provide structure for most of Standards ten tracks – perhaps more than on previous albums. The simple timbre of a xylophone to the confounding tones of old analogue equipment (and everything in-between) adds color and tonality, albeit unconventionally, to these soundscapes.

Such unlikely instrumental accompaniments and uncommon time signatures are what have defined Tortoise as the forefathers of post-rock and pioneers of modern music. “We’re all real conscious of avoiding musical clichs,” admitted bassist Doug McCombs to Inkblot magazine. And it shows. Just as the recondite poetry of Ezra Pound is considered the poet’s poetry, the music of Tortoise is the musician’s music.

Perhaps the only clich occurring on Standards is Tortoise themselves, doing the same thing they’ve done on all their previous albums. But, then again, it’s kind of hard to be clich when the basis for your music is experimentation and leads an enormous cult following to the frontier of modern music.