For nigh on 25 years now, unpredictability has been the stock-in-trade of Chicago’s Tortoise, and that ethos remains thoroughly intact on the band’s seventh studio full-length. It’s not that the quintet—“fronted” by producer and percussionist John McEntire and “driven,” let’s say, by guitarist Jeff Parker—eschews a stylistic direction from album to album. In fact, since around 2006’s The Brave and the Bold with Bonnie “Prince” Billy (aka Will Oldham), they’ve folded modular synthesizers more prominently into a sound that’s become less about post-rock and more laced with forays into experimental prog-jazz—but, of course, those labels, too, are useless. Better to just break it down like this: The music on The Catastrophist embraces an almost unwieldy host of familiar and left-field influences; You can hear vintage krautrockian Eno (“The Clearing Fills”) crossing synth-funk circuits with early Belew-era Crimson (“Hot Coffee”). There’s straight-up glam pop (a surprisingly loyal cover of David Essex’s ‘70s hit “Rock On,” with U.S. Maple’s Todd Rittmann) bookended by narco-psychedelic soul (“Yonder Blue,” hauntingly crooned by Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley). In the capable collective hands of Tortoise, nothing’s off the table, and somehow, that’s why it all fits together, like a slow-building mosaic that constantly reshapes itself until the last piece is in place.