5ive/Versus: Tortuga

This is basically a remix added re-release of a split album done with kid606, though now featuring the knob-turning handiwork of J.K. Broadwick, who has worked with Godflesh. It’s a semi-epic kind of naked and ugly concept rock, all shuddering distortion motifs and broken jazz drum riffing, which is pared down almost as far as Joy Division in a sense that it is more pregnant with tone and pacing than flickering wrists and prog rock prowess. For instance, if you, instrumentally speaking, lust for godheadsilo more than Gone, you know, something slightly laying on the back side of the beat and totemic, limber, and lunging, not succumbing to the more postured, though perhaps more adept, cinematic expressionism of Explosions in the Sky, then this is your meal ticket. It drives and drives and tumbles and stops and surges and drives more, then becomes the vortex, then becomes the vortex spillage, then becomes the spout, then becomes the eulogy for lost time and bodies…or a gray passage through time zones, earmarked by endless eddying and drifting cushioned by noise embers, like the Dead Man soundtrack by Neil Young, where just as you think things have petered out, the last comet trails have danced, or the ashes are caked in orange no more, there is still motion and movement, a reckoning of the infinite, the glory-void-hole of guitar memories. “Soma Remix Stage 2,” at over eight minutes, is a fine unspeakable (words seem to be inoperable here) liftoff to remember, mirroring each of those tendencies. Worth the whole package on its own.

Worth three potato chips.