ALBUM REVIEW: Iterations – Tortuga
Laying within the Greater Poland region, along the banks of the River Warta, Poznań is one of the oldest cities in Poland. With a long and rich history, Poznań contains a vast array of historical buildings and heritage sites that tell the story of this illustrious city. The majority of the city’s musical output is from the classical music genre, however, residing in its depths is the monumental, modern doom band TORTUGA. It is unclear if they’re named after the pirate island just off the coast of Haiti, but either way the Poznań quartet took the doom world by storm with their brooding mix of doom, stoner, prog and ambient.
The band’s third album sees them move away from monolithic slabs of stoner-doom and into more experimental and progressive environments. The aim of Iterations is to give you an auditory experience; ominous and eerie atmospherics are punctuated with strange synth passages, and, in the case of Malaca, layered multi-lingual samples are used to create strange yet urgent atmospheres that make the hairs on your neck stand up with tension.
In a conceptual sense, Iterations is a deeply reflective, metaphorical and thought-provoking album. It showcases the fact that TORTUGA are first and foremost storytellers, and this album looks deep into a humungous subject: the history of the universe. Whilst the story is a strange one fraught with danger and doom, it can also be applied to the duration of a person’s life, as they move through the cycles of birth, life and death.
By traversing the realms of experimental prog, TORTUGA have created an album unlike anything they have done before. Whilst the core doom trademarks of their sound are there, it feels like TORTUGA have digested a plethora of ‘end of the world’ sci-fi media. As a result, it is a raw, pensive and solemn journey through time and space, light and shadow, life and death. Despite the overarching theme of the album, each song tells its own story, moments within the history of the universe that trigger deeply thought-provoking images in your mind as waves of synth and distortion wash over you.
With this in mind, the album has a haunting quality to it. A reminder that in this vast plain of existence we are – to quote Carl Sagan – “a small blue dot”, floating in the darkness. This image is reinforced with TORTUGA’s fuzz-saturated, bass-heavy riffs that consume you like the darkness itself. In comparison to 2020’s Deities, Iterations has swerved completely off of their established path. TORTUGA have always had an imposingly dark sound, and by venturing into this experimental realm they’ve managed to make that darkness sound even more intimidating and foreboding.
They reinforce their concept with slow, heavy, pummelling chordal riffs augmented with constantly shifting synths while underneath the drums venture through so many different rhythms, so when it comes together it has a frightening, disorientating quality. In essence this album is oxymoronically full of emotion yet ruthlessly emotionless, which testifies to the unpredictability of the universe and how it can be calm or explode into a destructive rage at any given moment.
The album opens with Init, an eight-and-a-half-minute musical odyssey of swirling synths and moving drones underneath long droning riffs and solemn vocals. It moves into Lilith, that opens with a driving drum beat which is raw and hard to pin down. It is then swept under by a tidal wave of dark and imposing doom riffs, before it evolves into a dark and uncompromising track that is conceptually in a tug of war between the light and the shadows. At nine-and-a-half minutes, Lapses is the longest track on the record, and one of the most intricate, incorporating spacious synths and lusciously reverb-soaked guitar melodies that offer a brief moment of reflective calm. The song slowly builds up, adding more layers and synths before evolving into a punishingly heavy onslaught of half-time drums and distortion-drenched riffs.
Interlude segments the album with layers of ambient synthesisers and uplifting synth pad swells. It offers a moment for you to take a breath and reflect on how beautiful the universe is despite its frightening unpredictability. The aforementioned Malaca is a strangely experimental track that is wrought with tension and disorientation as what seems like voices of the past move around you and robotic voices quickly quell the babble they make. Quaus follows a similarly frantic and tense template with the terrifying vocoder voice making itself known. Closing track Epitaph feels like the odd calm after the apocalypse, a last farewell to what’s left of the human population.
Iterations is not for the faint of heart. TORTUGA have experimented in the abyss of space and produced a poignant album that will make you question everything about the universe and our place in it.
Rating: 8/10
Iterations is set for release on October 27th via Napalm Records.
Like TORTUGA on Facebook.