For more than 20 years, Tortoise has been one of indie rock’s most unique bands, if you can even call it a rock band at all. In fact, Tortoise’s music combines elements of jazz, classical, prog, dub, electronica and more.
While the instrumental group’s sound remains intact, its latest album, “The Catastrophist,” has a big surprise for fans: not one, but two songs with vocals — an original sung by Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley and a cover of David Essex’s 1973 hit “Rock On.”
amNewYork talked with bassist Doug McCombs.
“The Catastrophist” is built on music commissioned by the city of Chicago. How did that come about?
The commission was an idea thrown at us by this guy we knew who did a lot of arts programming for the city of Chicago. The idea was that we would perform a new set of unrecorded material and have guest musicians that were from the jazz community in Chicago.
How did that morph into the album?
Basically, we had to re-evaluate and sort of figure out what would make them work as Tortoise songs. With the absence of these guest musicians, what we had were these frameworks of ideas that weren’t that dynamic. … To make them interesting without the extra musicians we had to work on them more. In some instances, we had to come up with extra parts or bridges or extra harmonic elements so there was more going on.
Why did you decide to add vocals now?
First off, we are mostly perceived as an instrumental band and that’s completely understandable. [But] we had vocals on a lot of music in the past. Throughout the years, we’ve had singing on records, which has mostly gone unnoticed because it has been slightly disguised or not recognized as a human voice. … It’s kind of a coincidence that there happens to be two songs that made it onto the record that had vocals.
What made you want to cover “Rock On”?
I’ve heard that song pretty much since I was a teenager and I never had any feeling one way or the other about it until a couple of years ago when it just struck me. … It’s a weird song. It’s a hit radio song and perceived as this rock song but it’s hardly a rock song at all. It doesn’t have much drumming until the end of the song. It doesn’t have any guitar. … That just occurred to me one day when I heard it that it was unusual and weird and almost like a Tortoise song in some ways.
If you go
Tortoise is at (le) Poisson Rouge on March 16 at 8 p.m., 158 Bleecker St., 212-505-3474, sold out.
The band is at Littlefield on March 17 at 8 p.m., 622 Degraw St., Gowanus, littlefieldnyc.com, sold out
