Progress Report: Tortoise

NAME : Tortoise
PROGRESS REPORT : Recording their sixth studio LP at Soma Electronic Music Studios, Chicago, Illinois.

A strange part of every All Tomorrow's Parties festival is its "Don't Look Back" night, where bands play their most beloved album from beginning to end. For some of the bands at New York's ATP festival, like the Meat Puppets, it was a welcome return. But for bands that are still totally active, like Built To Spill and Tortoise, it feels a bit weird. Did we come to praise them or to bury them? The oddness of that show back in August wasn't lost on Tortoise's Doug McCombs either. "I think the types of people who are attracted to Tortoise, or who want to listen to Tortoise appreciate the fact that we're trying to evolve the music and push it in different directions," McCombs says. "So I think that, personally, for us, it's not really that satisfying to play an album that we made 15 years ago from beginning to end, just because we have covered so much ground between then and now."