Tortoise | Touch

With Touch, Tortoise members — Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Douglas McCombs, John McEntire, and Jeff Parker — channel their collectivist approach to songwriting, a lightly anarchic yet steadfastly egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego, steering toward an abstract muscularity.

While there are still excursions into the dark, elegantly tangled jazz moods that flourished on milestone works like Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, Touch is perhaps most notable for Tortoise’s uncompromising embrace of grand gestures.

Aerodynamically reengineered Krautrock, hand-cranked techno rave-ups, and spaghetti western fanfares are all infused with Tortoise’s now-signature internal logic — as alluring as it is bewildering, a puzzle to be savored rather than solved.