Battles - “Mirrored”
May 26th, 2007
2007 has been an amazing year for records so far - and we haven’t even reached Summer yet. As well as stunning turns by Von Sudenfed, Dinosaur Jr and Dalek we’ve had three stone cold classics in the form of ‘Sound of Silver’, ‘The Magic Position’ and now this. Battles, for the uninitiated, are a four piece featuring ex-Helmet sticksman John Stanier, multi-instrumentalist Ty Braxton, former Don Caballero guitarist and keyboardist Ian Williams and Dave Konopka from Lynx. They caused something of a stir a year or so ago when Warp gave their first two EPs a licensed release in the UK and they came over for a number of gigs including an amazing turn at Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival.
But if people had them pinned down as math rock experimentalists (an incorrect assumption even then) this album visibly dispels that myth immediately. From the opener ‘Race: In’ this album is a sunburst of ideas and styles, presumably painstakingly written, and fairly difficult to play but never anything less than instantaneously accessible. The set up works like this: John hammers out the kind of jazz and metal inflected breaks that work as a focal point for the rest of the band, who evolve and devolve loops all around him. Trilling and thrilling themes ebb and flow, keyboard riffs ape guitars which in turn ape processed vocal loops. Amazingly this is actually how they sound live as well, at any one point during a track by Battles up to eight instruments (vox included) are being played by four people.
The most astounding track on an astounding album is the aptly titled ‘Atlas’, which is a conceptual joke of sorts. The Helmet vet travels regularly to see his girlfriend in Cologne where the DJs had grown really sick of the minimalist Kompact scene and started hanging out in rock clubs before transferring their own lolloping Glitter beat to techno tunes to create shcaffel; the sound that would eventually influence Goldfrapp and Rachel Stevens. Battles thought it would be funny to cover the techno as a rock band and see what the results would be like. They were, of course, phenomenal. Elsewhere the symphonic prog pop of The Cardiacs informs on ‘Ddiamondd’; the sumptuous horror-show of ‘Rembrandt Pussy Horse’-era Buttholes on the creepy ‘Leyendecker’ and the twitchy jazz rock of ‘Tij’. This is not just an album that can be appreciated by fans of the avant-garde, pop and rock alike but a genuine fuck you to the people claiming modern music has nowhere left to go. Essential.
John Doran
But if people had them pinned down as math rock experimentalists (an incorrect assumption even then) this album visibly dispels that myth immediately. From the opener ‘Race: In’ this album is a sunburst of ideas and styles, presumably painstakingly written, and fairly difficult to play but never anything less than instantaneously accessible. The set up works like this: John hammers out the kind of jazz and metal inflected breaks that work as a focal point for the rest of the band, who evolve and devolve loops all around him. Trilling and thrilling themes ebb and flow, keyboard riffs ape guitars which in turn ape processed vocal loops. Amazingly this is actually how they sound live as well, at any one point during a track by Battles up to eight instruments (vox included) are being played by four people.
The most astounding track on an astounding album is the aptly titled ‘Atlas’, which is a conceptual joke of sorts. The Helmet vet travels regularly to see his girlfriend in Cologne where the DJs had grown really sick of the minimalist Kompact scene and started hanging out in rock clubs before transferring their own lolloping Glitter beat to techno tunes to create shcaffel; the sound that would eventually influence Goldfrapp and Rachel Stevens. Battles thought it would be funny to cover the techno as a rock band and see what the results would be like. They were, of course, phenomenal. Elsewhere the symphonic prog pop of The Cardiacs informs on ‘Ddiamondd’; the sumptuous horror-show of ‘Rembrandt Pussy Horse’-era Buttholes on the creepy ‘Leyendecker’ and the twitchy jazz rock of ‘Tij’. This is not just an album that can be appreciated by fans of the avant-garde, pop and rock alike but a genuine fuck you to the people claiming modern music has nowhere left to go. Essential.
John Doran
Taken from: playlouder.com
MySpace: myspace.com/battlestheband
Play at: July 20 at Studio B - Brooklyn, NY
Aug 31 at Seaport Music Festival, NYC
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