Friday Full-Length: Tortuga, Deities
Posted in Bootleg Theater on January 27th, 2023 by JJ KoczanPoznań, Poland’s Tortuga released their second album, Deities, early in 2020 on vinyl through Greece’s Made of Stone Recordings. The follow-up to their 2017 self-titled debut, it runs seven songs and 53 minutes — one assumes the vinyl is edited, or otherwise that the grooves are packed very, very tightly together — and is a pure example of what I mean when I employ the oft-used phrase ‘dug in.’ With production, guitars and vocals from Bablo (who softened his first consonant; it was previously Pablo), guitar, synth and vocals from Kłosu (who also mixed and recorded, with Achim), bass from Heszu and the steady rolling drums of Marmur, Tortuga languidly lumber through the culmination of “Esoteric Order” like they just invented wah, and it’s precisely that sense of the band being right there with the listener at the moment of righteousness, that kind of feeling that one might share in-person at a show, when they know it’s going good and you know it’s going good and that feeling of electricity and communion circles through the crowd. They’re into it as much as you are. You can feel them in the rehearsal space thinking, ‘Yeah, this is gonna be great,’ when they were writing, imagine the same conversation in the studio and then hear it in how they actually play the song.
That kind of feeling is writ large across Deities. It is a major unifying factor of the songs, which take a loosely Lovecraftian lyrical thematic and basically just play with it. The source of so much ultra-serious heavy metal, things dark, grim and tentacled, is on Deities boiled down to a kind of stoned brain-meander in which Yig, H.P. Lovecraft’s the lord of the Lizards, a god, is jealous of all the attention Godzilla gets in movies and so on. “Black Pharaoh II” is also Lovecraft-based and in complement to “Esoteric Order,” which puts the audience in this land of monsters following the instrumental intro “Shining Sphere” — which makes plenty of declarations of its own as regards the tonality with which Tortuga will convey their plod — the penultimate “Trip” is a lyrical moment of clarity in which the character making their way through this hellscape realizes that it’s all the result of having dropped too much acid. The lyrics, by Bablo and Anakolut — last names need not apply; they keep it casual — are a particular point of charm, but it’s really that ‘dug in’ sensibility that most comes through the listening experience. The distinct feeling that they’re having a good time too, that they know their music taps into a very specific kind of fun — a very specific kind of humor, though I wouldn’t call their material a joke on any level, even on “For Elizard” where the chorus is, “Yig hates Godzilla/Fuck you Godzilla” — and that not everybody is going to understand. They’re dug in. They’re riding the grooves of their own making. They’ve worked to craft their tones, their riffs, their songs, into either these hugely weighted slumps or the kind of rocking pushes one finds in the early going of the instrumental “Defective Mind Transfer” or the more atmospheric beginning of “Shining Sphere” from whence the full breadth of their distortion emerges like a tentacled god-beast from the more ethereal waters. It’s at 1:12 in the intro. You can’t miss it.
And if you’re listening at all, you won’t miss it, which is even more important. Because part of the communication that’s coming through Deities, and part of its being so dug in, stems from the fact that Tortuga clearly know who their audience is, because they’re it. Even as closer “Galeón de Manila” swaps out English lyrics for Spanish and moves with deceptive smoothness between elden doom and bell-of-ride, heads-down, forward-surge black metal before dissolving to nearly eight minutes of feedback, residual coming-apart and drone — this is in the digital version, not necessarily the LP — finishing the record with an unexpected twist, that change isn’t out of line for the kind of heavy that Tortuga play, and so it doesn’t feel out of place. If they started singing in Polish, I don’t think it would hurt the experience either. By the time they get there, you’ve already been up, down and around the mountains of madness, past the fields of wah in “Esoteric Order,” into the explosive, revelry-plod of “For Elizard,” through the semi-psych sample-topped musings of “Defective Mind Transfer,” the slam-that-fuzz-home midsection of “Black Pharaoh II” — you want to hear ‘dug in’ made manifest; cue up “Black Pharaoh II” at 2:30 into its total 6:10 and let it ride until the vocals come back at the very end, which is exactly what they do — the jaunty bounce that starts “Trip,” and far back at the start, the little flourish of synth that maybe marked the transfer from one world to another, so that they decide to turn all that dense fuzz to more ripper purposes for a stretch, well, you’ve already been steamrolled so why not?
No, Deities isn’t revolutionary. It’s not shaping genre in its own image either in the stoned or other heavy styles. It has a presence and a personality of its own, to be sure, but that comes well within the borders of genre, and the sense one gets from Tortuga is that they know it, they celebrate it, they want to celebrate it with their audience, as if to say, ‘Come check out this very, very large sound we have made.’ Or perhaps alternately, ‘Come dig in with us.’ Thus Deities, like religious dogma, offers an inherent feeling of community for those who listen and ‘get it.’ It’s not going to be everybody, but if you can hear the fun in “Esoteric Order” and “For Elizard,” then that invite to dig in should be a simple enough RSVP. Tortuga are the converted, holding a mass for the converted, and as much as their theme on Deities is hyper-specific, that ethic is mirrored in their instrumental bent. They know what they want to sound like because they know what they like. They are well and truly dug in, and unto its last drone, Deities is that much stronger an offering because of it. I don’t know if the Great Old Ones dig riffs or not, but if not, they’re missing out here.
As always, thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy.
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Already this morning, the kid’s up. 5:06AM he came downstairs the first time. I was about two and a half paragraphs into the above. I put him back to bed — because, well, that’s too fucking early for him to be up — told him I’d set a timer for an hour and to go back to sleep. It’s 5:35AM right now and he’s come out of his room twice since, so really I’m just delaying the inevitable trying to get him some more rest which he’ll need so that at 2PM he doesn’t collapse into being a complete bastard because he’s too tired, and allow myself some time to work. I expect and know this effort will fail.
He just opened the bedroom door and said he has to pee; his ultimate not-going-back-to-bed weapon. Like a limit break in Final Fantasy VIII. I am defeated. It would really be something to be able to finish one of these posts on my laptop instead of my phone for a change one of these weeks. Feels like it’s been a very long time. I also wouldn’t mind going a day without having to mop up piss from all over the bathroom floor because, while gender is a complex issue in our house — I actually had another aside here explaining that but it was too long; bottom line is maybe trans? which presents all kinds of dangers in this hateful-ass country — he still wants to pee standing up and also holds it in for too long and then sprays the bathroom like he’s fucking powerwashing it. But these are apparently pretty big asks of life right now. And I work to remind myself that things will not always be as they are right now. Daily. Also I get high. Mostly in the afternoons and evenings. It is a wellness thing for me. I’ve been swimming every other morning at the gym near the house. The Patient Mrs. and I have been doing yoga videos. All of these things connect in my mind.
This weekend is family time. My oldest nephew turns 15 on Monday, so we’re having that whole crew over for dinner tomorrow, then brunch with Slevin and his fiancée on Sunday. Somewhere in there I’m supposed to do a sticker-quote for a Blood Lightning album and liner notes for PostWax. It’ll be a fucking miracle if I can get to the one-or-two-sentence thing there, let alone dig into the REZN/Vinnum Sabbathi collaboration and give it its descriptive due for a sheet that will be included with the release. I feel stupid and useless, even sitting here giving a shit about that stuff while my kid counts the seconds on the timer I set until we can turn on Sesame Street. He got a little music player this week that plays the theme. He sings along to it. It’s the kind of future-memory I should treasure for the rest of my life an example of what a sweet, wonderful person he is. But because I’m a narcissistic ogre, all I can think about is getting ‘work’ done for which I’m neither compensated nor ever truly able to finish.
So there you have it. Next week is a premiere from the new Stöner EP, a review of Strider, a premiere for Blackwülf, a full stream for Soothsayer Orchestra, and a review for Mathew’s Hidden Museum. That’s where the week is at now. Looking at it, it seems kind of ambitious. If I still have it in me by next Thursday to review that Mathew’s Hidden Museum and give it its due, I will. Otherwise I’ll push it back. I doubt Mr. Bethancourt is holding his breath for that, in any case. Really, I’m just ready to check out now and maybe spend the rest of the day just listening to music instead of thinking about it. Probably not going to happen.
A little discouraged, maybe, but persistent. Put it on my tombstone.
Have a great and safe weekend. Have fun, watch your head, hydrate. I’m punching out to go do domestic whathaveyou, which probably means dishes, laundry or both.
FRM.
