After five previous full-length releases and various other projects including collaborations and remix albums, they now return with Beacons Of Ancestorship, their first all-new material since 2004's It's All Around You.

Post-Rock is, in fact, the least obvious category into which this music can be placed, with only a few parts of Monument Six One Thousand really fitting the bill. Much more prevalent are elements of jazz, or even jazz-funk (High Class Slim Came Floatin' In, Minors); a sleazy, knowingly cheesy brand of lounge (Prepare Your Coffin, Penumbra, The Fall Of Seven Diamonds); electronica (Northern Something) and, of course, progressive rock (Prepare Your Coffin, Gigantes, Yinxiangechengqi).

It would be doing this album a great disservice, however, were one to simply play a reductive game of "pin the genre on the track". What such descriptions would leave out would be the remarkable way in which the band, in fact, achieve a masterful sense of coherence, in the midst of all this genre-blending.

Often music this seemingly free-form can leave the listener with a sense that the artists themselves are unsure where each track, or each improvised segment, are leading - an unsettling feeling. Here, the end result, and the confidence of the performance are never in question.

From the super-tight drumming (best exhibited on High Class Slim Came Floatin' In, Prepare Your Coffin, Yinxianghechengqi, and especially on Northern Something, where it sounds almost martial) to the synth sounds that can be authoritative, and hard, deep to the point of near-inaudibility (Gigantes) or enjoyably funky (Prepare Your Coffin), this is always unquestionably music that knows itself and is intentional and very deliberate in the journey (albeit sometimes circuitous) upon which it wishes to take the listener.

Lovely little flourishes and segues abound: this is an album that merits repeated and concentrated listening. The way that the opening and closing tracks use the same trick of repeating a five- or six-note sequence as an anchor over music that twists and changes in rhythm and tempo, for example; or the hypnotic quality of Gigantes, with its handclaps, squelchy underwater synths and exotic strings; or the magnificent, unquantifiable sense of menace with which Yinxianghechengqi is somehow seamed. One feels that no matter how many times you hear tracks like Monument Six One Thousand you will never get a total understanding of its slippy, intertwining, shifting rhythms and melodies.

Godfathers of Post-Rock, then? Much, much more than this, surely, on this album's evidence alone. Call it the fascinating intersection of jazz, lounge, prog and electro, if you must, but ultimately Tortoise produce music of the most valuable and enduring kind - beyond genres and labels, in a category all of its own.

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Mercury Prize 2009 nominees