Lots of folks know Douglas McCombs as a member of Chicago’s well-loved post-rockers Tortoise, but a smaller number of listeners are familiar with his recordings under the name Brokeback, a hype-resistant and consistently interesting project that hasn’t released a record in a decade. Brokeback and the Black Rock brings an end to that gap in productivity however, and also greatly alters what came before. If markedly different, it’s still a very good album and a welcome return, one that hopefully points to a second phase of productivity from under its reactivated banner.
The genre of post-rock has covered a lot of stylistic range, more than most genres in fact, with the term being tagged to bands as diverse as Stereolab, Mogwai, Gastr del Sol, Flying Saucer Attack, Battles, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. In a sense, post-rock was/is a wide enough field that when the descriptor comes attached to an unheard group or artist it doesn’t really prepare the listener for what they are going to get as much as it provides a template for what they aren’t.
For example Chicago’s Tortoise, one of the cornerstone bands in the whole post-rock shebang, can be defined through much of their discography as embodying a new form of fusion, with jazz very much a part of their musical vocabulary, even if it’s essentially inaccurate to describe them as a jazz group.
That is, instead of inhabiting an improvisational zone, Tortoise have been consistently more interested in the moods, structural complexity, and even instrumentation (particularly the vibraphone) that also shape the jazz form, and rather than fuse with R&B or the late-‘60s-early-‘70s rock music that provided fiber for two main threads in the original Fusion impulse, they examined genres such as Krautrock, dub, and electronica.
