Album Review: Brokeback - Brokeback And The Black Rock

Three words: bass, guitar and drums. In contemporary music that's pretty much all you need to know. You can almost hear the sound. Surely words like 'tight,' 'urgent,' and 'take no prisoners' will follow. Bass, guitar and drums: it's almost a genre itself. Though some would argue that it's another example of how homogenised and devoid of new ideas our music making has become.

Yet Brokeback return the words to where they belong, as ingredients, and demonstrate that the main concern should be whose hands said bass, guitar and drums are in.

Beginning life as a side project for Tortoise's Doug McCombs, over a series of five albums, both the sound and personnel have changed markedly with each release. Everyone from Mary Hansen and Laetitia Sadier from Stereolab, to Rob Mazurek (Chicago Underground), to James McNew (Yo La Tengo) have appeared and disappeared, whilst the sounds have equally delved in and out of electronics, jazz and of course post rock.    

Brokeback And The Black Rock, the band's first album in ten years, again sees new personnel, and of course the aforementioned stripped-down approach. One look at the cover should tell you everything. This is desert highway twang, the place where Tortoise's TNT, Ennio Morricone Westerns and, wait for it, Neil Young's Crazy Horse, meet on a lonely stretch of road in the middle of nowhere. With a fuzzy guitar and repetitive rollicking groove it's hard at times not to be reminded of Crazy Horse's lumbering energy, yet it's harnessed by Tortoise's assured bass grooves.

McCombs and co utilise the stripped-down ingredients to create mood and space, displaying a patience and a desire to say more with less, mining the space where film score ends and post rock begins.