Concert Review: Tortoise

Revolution Hall, Portland, OR
March 28th, 2023

Every once in a while, you get to see a show that perhaps you didn’t want to leave the house to actually see — but it ends up being exactly what you didn’t realize you needed. These kinds of nights are rare, no matter how many concerts you see — it requires not only for the venue to sound great, and the crowd to be nice and respectful, and most importantly, for the band to be dialed the fuck in. After their October date at Revolution Hall was sidelined by a positive COVID test while their opener was onstage, Portland/Chicago post-rock titans Tortoise were just the band to deliver an evening like that.

It has been six years since the last Portland show — an April 20th performance as part of Soul’d Out Music Festival’s 2017 slate of performances, housed at the Crystal Ballroom — and as the last one was a magical, heady evening of music, this one had some big shoes to fill. Perhaps that’s where the pangs of “Can’t I just stay home tonight?” came from: lofty expectations built on having seen a performance that felt very special. The problem is, though, Tortoise are a legendary and beloved band for a reason, and part of that is that they are an obscenely tight live band.

Over the course of roughly 90 minutes, the various members of Tortoise rotated around the stage near-constantly — often, in the middle of the song, someone would put down their instrument to walk to the other end of the stage to play a completely different one. Few bands do this, and it’s obvious why: for every band except those who do do it, it’s a recipe for disaster not even worth attempting. But Tortoise aren’t bound by conventional songwriting approaches, and their music frequently evolves greatly over the course of its runtime. The crisscrossing of the Rev Hall stage added a theatricality to each song, as you’d wonder what sounds would flare into life once the wizard behind them had gotten comfortable at their stool, or behind their synth table.

And, even more than all of that, live versions of Tortoise songs behave in unexpected ways, which means that their concerts don’t ever feel like other concerts do. Each song’s live counterpart feels like they’re capable of transporting you into different headspaces, different moods, different pockets of gravity. That’s hyperbolic, sure, but it’s not — post-rock has always been a genre that doesn’t play by the rules of time, able to cram multi-part epics into 10-minute runtimes. Surely it isn’t surprising that their performances, especially when you dial into their frequency, can make a 90 minute concert feel like a flat 45, but also make one song feel half an hour long while you’re inside it. For those close enough to the stage to really get to watch the players tinker — and most importantly, examine the careful interplay between twin drummers John McEntire (who was, it should be noted, a recent guest of Spectrum Culture’s Enjoy Your Life podcast) and John Herndon. For drum nerds, this is a must-see band — McEntire and Herndon’s polyrhythms are a thing of beauty, and mercifully, watching them do it does nothing to rob it of its magic.

Their setlist for the evening zig-zagged its way through their entire discography, from their self-titled 1994 debut all the way up to their most recent album, 2016’s The Catastrophist. Die-hard fans of their seminal 1998 record TNT were the most spoiled members of the crowd, as they trotted their way through a whopping five songs from the record, from the Spaghetti Western-flavored “I Set My Face to the Hillside” to the bulletproof “Swung From the Gutters,” each tighter and more engrossing than the last. The show’s pinnacle came in the form of the aforementioned “Swung From the Gutters,” which saw the band embracing their meandering urges and slipping into a long side-journey before, shockingly, returning to the song already in progress. Another was the hypnotic “Ten-Day Interval,” which was played by three different musicians, two of them on a single glockenspiel, and the other on xylophone on the opposite end of the stage, fully in sync as they traversed the song.

It’s a thrill to get to see Tortoise play in a venue as small and easy-going as Revolution Hall, but it’s hard not to wonder: why isn’t this band playing in concert halls? Why do they only play in Portland’s rock clubs, and not somewhere like the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, with a dynamite sound system and stellar acoustics? We should be so lucky! Dreams aside, this show was a reminder of how transportative and refreshing it can be to see a band with the pure talent of Tortoise. You might start the night dreading being in public, but by the time the encore is over, you’ll be mad it has to end at all.