Battles - the "Mirrored" era

[jaxxalude]

XLR8R

Battles Releases Debut LP

They have no plan, they’re not a band, and they make some of the most challenging and inventive music around. Battles’ offerings so far have been more about quality than quantity, which means they’ve never had enough tracks to release a full-length.

All of that changes this Spring, when Mirrored drops. This new album sees the group’s previously upbeat, instrumental compositions exploring a wider range of sounds and emotions, as well as the addition of vocals to the tracks.

Battles has never adhered to any specific formula as far as genre is concerned, nor has the group proclaimed a mission statement. A far cry from more traditional acts that operate as a single entity with a lead soloist, Battles is made up of only soloists, artists with separate careers and divergent approaches to the music. This, more than anything, explains why frantically strummed guitars can coexist with slow, precise drumbeats, gentle bells, and vocals that often resemble an acapella chorus from the Renaissance. In Battles’ universe, this is just another day in the studio.

Mirrored is out May 15, 2007 on Warp.

Tracklisting
1. Race:In
2. Atlas
3. Ddiamondd
4. Tonto
5. Leyendecker
6. Rainbow
7. Bad Trails
8. Prismism
9. Snare Hangar
10. Tij
11. Race:Out

Meanwhile, the group hits the road at the end of this month for an extensive tour around North America, including a stop-off at the annual Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago.

Tour Dates
03/20 Baltimore, MD: Ottobar
03/22 Philadelphia, PA: First Unitarian Church
03/23 Washington, DC: Black Cat
03/24 Chapel Hill, NC: Local 506
03/25 Atlanta, GA: Drunken Unicorn
03/27 Birmingham, AL: Bottletree
03/28 Lexington, KY: The Dame
03/29 Cleveland Heights, OH: Grog Shop
03/30 Chicago, IL: Empty Bottle
03/31 Pittsburgh, PA: Gooskis
04/01 Toronto, ON: Lees Palace
04/02 Buffalo, NY: Soundlab
04/03 New York, NY: Bowery Ballroom
04/04 Montreal, QC: La Sala Rossa
04/05 Boston, MA: Great Scott
04/06 Providence, RI: AS220
07/14 Chicago, IL: Pitchfork Music Festival



==================================//==========================================

These guys are the perfect alternative to Air at this stage. Let's just say they sound like Air with balls!

[jaxxalude]

Video for lead single "Atlas" right here. It's your chance to hear "Air with balls"^TM! Or maybe this is just "Krautrock 2007"^TM and I was just full of shit.

[jaxxalude]

UNCUT'S JOHN MULVEY'S WILD MERCURY SOUND

Battles

It seems a long time ago now, when I thought post-rock was the most exciting music in the world. The thing with those early records by Tortoise and such was that they made anything seem possible. Post-rock was never going to supersede rock, but in the mid-'90s it still felt like a fantastically open-minded scene. The bands weren't hung up on the old signifiers of rock, they had this voracious appetite for so much music: jazz, electronica, Krautrock, endlessly obscure diversions from the well-beaten path. There were no apparent rules, which made it all the more disappointing that it became so formulaic so fast.

I guess the stately post-rockers, rather than the eclectic jazzbos, were the ones to blame: Mogwai and Godspeed! You Black Emperor made frequently terrific records, but they had an assimilable schtick that could easily be copied by mundane crescendo-jockeys like Explosions In The Sky. One moment post-rock meant nothing but could mean anything, the next it was a quiet-loud-quiet-loud instrumental cliche.

Battles, though, make me feel like there's life in post-rock yet. Over the past few years, they've relocated the restless, questing imperative that made the scene initially so cool. "Mirrored" is their debut album proper, and it often feels like a deluxe technological upgrade of those first couple of Tortoise albums. There's a similar sense of hardcore kids branching out into a dizzying range of styles, but still retaining a sort of punkoid attack mentality, even when they're heading into jazz terrain.

Battles, of course, are not kids. Their CVs reveal apprenticeships in a bunch of bands - among them Don Caballero and Helmet - from the tougher, mathematical end of post-rock. All muscle, stamina, hard-edged theory.

"Mirrored", though, is much more fun. You could argue that there's not much heart or emotion here, that many of these tracks are exercises in hybridising genres at high intensity. But that would be to ignore how exhilarating it all is, from the math-Afrobeat start of "Race: In" onwards. Yeah, there's a lot of technoflash, and a few tunes like "Ddiamondd" bear a huge debt to prog, albeit prog compressed and diced beyond recognition.

Then songs like "Atlas" stomp in, riding a rhythm that owes as much to the Glitterbeat as it does to the avant-garde, and the mischievous magpie spirit of Battles really comes to the fore. "Leyendecker" even suggests they've been inspired by those chattering, capricious R&B productions by Timbaland (his early Aaliyah tunes, maybe). It feels like Battles are stretching way beyond the "approved" chinstroker references and making genuinely broad-minded, exciting music. Warp are putting it out in May, by the way.

[jaxxalude]

LEAKED!

[jaxxalude]

Thomas Whitehead from Playolouder is still weary After The Battles.

And while we're at it, you can check out this XLR8R's new April 2007 issue (#106 in their History). Battles are on the cover. And you know what? You can download the entire issue completely for FREE right here!

[banet2001]

Battles
Mirrored
[Warp; 2007]
Rating: 9.1

Marc Bolan may be dead, but Battles can rebuild him. They have the technology. On "Atlas", the second track on the band's debut album, drummer John Stanier's pistons pump out a steroidal version of Bolan's trademark shuffling stomp-beat. His three bandmates-- Ian Williams, Dave Konopka, and Tyondai Braxton-- constrict their two-note keyboards and one-note guitars until the song coalesces into a stiff, slick, swinging robot rock. It's like a skills-exchange workshop where mechanically minded krautrockers are encouraged to share their knowledge with remedial class glam bands only interested in big beat thrills. And as the almost-club-friendly single, it's the perfect introduction to the rest of Mirrored, easing you into the album's mix of over-the-top whimsy, extreme analogue rhythms that are often as much jazz-fusion as IDM as tech-metal, vocals that would do Roger Troutman proud, and vice-tight, "live or laptop?" musicianship connected as much by USB ports and Firewire cables as the improvisatory interplay of four dudes just jamming.

In fact, Battles may be the first band to really play with the way that 21st century software can extend and distend the sound of a rock band in real time; Mirrored moves in ways that Battles' first two instrumental EPs--post-rock played with the locked-down seriousness of modern techno--only suggested. Early Battles shows could sound like a metal band performing Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, and Mirrored spurns solos, favoring a caffeinated maximalism where compositions are built out of 100 microscopic parts. The guitarist/keyboardists string together tracks out of riffs that crisscross with the careful preplanning of a subway system. Each instrument on opening track "Race In"-- Stanier's military-precise massed snares, the guitars tensely climbing up and down a few notes, what sound like synthetic tubular bells-- is added with the deliberate patience of a Terry Riley composition. The song feels nervously repetitive, like it's suffering from OCD.

If you've seen Battles live, you've probably seen the phrase "ex-members of" written on the flyer, and so maybe none of this surprises you. Save Stanier, everyone in Battles is a multi-instrumentalist, playing a prog album's worth of guitars, electronics, and/or keyboards. Braxton's put in time splitting the difference between IDM and avant-garde electronics; Konopka played with underrated indie instrumentalists Lynx, Stanier drummed for scholastic-metal pioneers Helmet; Williams finger-tapped for Don Caballero. But while there's certainly more than a shade of math rock's intricacy on Mirrored, tracks like the terse, tambourine-rattling quasi-funk of "Tonto" or Stanier's time-signature and tempo f**kery on the crescendo-crazed "Tij", the stern stuff is continually undercut by a vibe that's more romper room than po-faced. The "hook" on "Race In" is a whistle-while-you-work chant that they're probably humming down at Fraggle Rock. The astounding "Rainbow" spins into dizzying Rube Goldberg corkscrews of keyboard, xylophone, and giddily speed-attenuated symphonic metal drums. It sounds like the band is trying to recreate the Looney Tunes cartoon where Bugs and Daffy are dueling orchestra conductors, each driving their ensembles to crazier and crazier call-and-response peaks.

And what makes Mirrored's merry melodies really stand out isn't the crazy quilt structures or needlepoint precision of the playing. It's the frenzied gibberish of Braxton's pitch-shifted and electronically processed vocals-- a kind of ecstatic robot that's speaking in cartoon tongues. When "Atlas" dropped a few months back, those vocals were a squeaky line in the sand for old fans, and across the internet, everyone had the same thought: "Why are Battles suddenly aping the Animal Collective?" But Avey Tare and company hardly invented high-pitched sing-song vocals-- just ask David Seville. On "Leyendecker", Braxton croons in a falsetto that's been whipped up by technology until it sounds like a neutered D'Angelo. Combined with the music, a low-res quasi-R&B beat as grainy as a glitch track, Braxton's circuitry pushes "Leyendecker" into far stranger places than any the Collective has wandered into. Throughout Mirrored he shreds his vocals with the post-human glee of Warp labelmate Jackson and His Computer Band, whether it's the joyful opening burst of voice on "Ddiamondd" that spits pitch-bent consonants, or "Tij", where Braxton pants and wheezes in a creeped-out asthmatic lower-register. You couldn't even approximate "Leyendecker", or any of Mirrored's 11 tracks, with just acoustic guitars and voices.

At the same time, listen closely to the intro to "Atlas" and you'll hear the pedal on Stanier's kit hitting the kickdrum in the physical world of the studio, pushing air as the hammer connects with the skin. Even when reminiscent of the unfeasible programming of post-drill'n'bass electronica, Battles' spastic drums are being played in real time, with the brute force and metronome-focus of a guy with a background in heavy rock. But its avant-pop hooks and ultrabrite melodies are being dissembled and reassembled by pitiless CPUs in equally real time. It's thrilling and disorienting because the virtuosity of both man and machine means that, unlike earlier rock/techno hybrids hampered by both technically unskilled players and crude technology, Battles sound is indivisible. Battles may not be the world's first bionic rock group, but they've done more to extend the idea of a flesh-and-blood band enhanced by computer technology than anyone since the late, lamented Disco Inferno. Mirrored is a breathtaking aesthetic left-turn that sounds less like rock circa 2007 than rock circa 2097, a world where Marshall stacks and micro-processing go hand in hand.

www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/42910-mirrored

[oscillations.]

I really like their album & I'm seeing them on Aug. 31st at a free show @ South Street Seaport, NYC. Anyone in the area should try to attend.

[jaxxalude]

^ Good to know you liked it. :)

[jaxxalude]

Battles Rages On
Katie Hasty and Taylor Grimes, N.Y.

[oscillations.]

one of the best albums of the year.

represent!

[banet2001]

It will do quite well on my year end album list. ;)