ith his all-bass duo Brokeback, Tortoise’s Doug McCombs has taken his parent group’s jazzy instrumentals into totally new and unexpected territory. On 2001’s experimental offering Morse Code in the Modern Age, McCombs and his cohort Noel Kupersmith (of the Chicago Underground Trio) crafted lengthy near-ambient explorations using mostly just McCombs’ bass guitar and Kupersmith’s upright bass. But the album’s brief closing song—and its best moment—was a joyous, straightforward cover of Roy Orbison’s “Running Scared” which points the way towards the more accessible direction taken on their latest outing Looks At the Bird.


The album is comprised almost entirely of McCombs and Kupersmith’s textured interplay on the low-end, touching on jazz, rock, and Morricone-style film soundtracks as they create lovely, pastoral instrumentals that drift by lazily like leaves on a stream. The duo is joined by Chicago Underground coronetist Rob Mazurek on a few tracks, and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen add their distinctive wordless vocalizing to a few others, but the highlight throughout is on the bass-work.


The nine fairly brief tracks here breeze by easily, held aloft by the gorgeous minimal bass and guitar figures. Perhaps oddly for a record dominated by the bass, there seems to be a lot more melody than there is rhythm, but that just makes songs like “50 Guitars,” with its piercing, wandering lead, that much more lovelier. A cover of Tortoise’s “The Suspension Bridge At Iguazú Falls” is driven along by a martial rhythm and a slightly Spanish accent to its plucked guitars.


Other standouts come in the form of the album’s guest stars: Rob Mazurek contributes one of his distinctive vibrating coronet solos to “Lupé,” and Mary Hansen’s vocals throughout (and particularly on the despondent conclusion to “Pearl’s Dream”) are ethereal and beautiful.


For most of the album, however, things move slowly without making much fuss. Looks At the Bird is perfectly suited to passive listening, a sound tapestry to hang in the background of your day, like a window you can pass by every so often to see the birds flitting around in the yard. It’s all quite beautiful and inoffensive, and that in itself may be an admirable goal. But what it lacks is the experimental—or at least, improvisatory—bent of Tortoise, as well as lacking a lot of what made the last Brokeback record so great.


Certainly, it’s way more immediately enjoyable than Morse Code in the Modern Age, picking up where “Running Scared” left off. But the reason that song worked so well at the end of the last Brokeback album was because it was preceded by a half hour of mind-opening exploration. “Running Scared” was a much-needed release in the form of a pop nugget after a wildly experimental album—the sublime tension between those three heavenly minutes and the dark, tense ambient flow that came before them was what solidified that record’s greatness. Looks At the Bird dispenses with that adventurous spirit altogether, and what’s left is an album full of pleasant pop nuggets.