TORTOISE & BONNIE "PRINCE" BILLY: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD

Tortoise....music on the cutting edge of instrumental post rock...except for this album. Will Oldham joins Tortoise on every one of these songs making them very experimental for him, but sort of normal fare for Tortoise, except for the fact that the singing takes the limelight and pushes Tortoise instrumental beauty and ingenuity to the background. This album is still quite avant garde, but the songs individually don't always quite work very well. There is really good and really bad here, leaving an album that is inconsistent. Now, I love variety, I don't like albums that stay safe and full of same- ness, but when the odd songs don't work very well, then I find that inconsistent. Songs 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10 work quite well and tend to lean towards an artsy indie-folkish sound which I like, but, except for track 3, are lacking in progressive elements. Songs 4, 5, 6, 7 are not very well arranged and seem convoluted and drag down the middle section of the album. I could forgive this not being a completely progressive album if the most progressive songs on here were not done so horribly wrong. But, there are a lot of other excellent Tortoise albums out there to make up for this, thank the Great Turtle God. I have to give this a 3 star rating because there are enough good songs to make it listenable, but there is too much waste on here to make it an excellent addition to a prog rock collection.