Battles: La Di Da Di

BATTLES: LA DI DA DI (2015)

1) The Yabba; 2) Dot Net; 3) FF Bada; 4) Summer Simmer; 5) Cacio E Pepe; 6) Non-Violence; 7) Dot Com; 8) Tyne Wear; 9) Tricentennial; 10) Megatouch; 11) Flora > Fauna; 12) Luu Le.

Well, the third Battles album is here, and the main difference is that this time, they have omitted vocals altogether. Which is a plus — because they used to know a million ways of making vocals sound annoying and irritating — but also a minus, because without the vocals, Battles move even closer to the status of a «pure intellectual construct» than ever before. Now they just play robot-engineered progressive rock, which is all right for a world soon-to-be populated with robots, but not quite all right for a world still populated with organic brains.

That said, in the long run it might be a noble decision, and not just because the time of our being overrun with robots is nigh at hand (I have no idea, really), but also because in this way, they have intentionally and viciously massacred all hopes for a «pop» career in an epoch when even the deepest and subtlest performers can hardly withstand such a temptation. I mean, maybe ʽIce Creamʼ and ʽAtlasʼ could still hope to find some sort of mass audience, but ʽThe Yabbaʼ and ʽFF Badaʼ, released as singles from this album, will shoo away people with their titles first, their lack of vocals second, and the "Oh! I thought they were cool clubbin' weirdos, but apparently they're just weirdos!" reaction nailing the final nails. And that is okay for the 2010s, a time period where the equation «popularity» = «overhyped crap» probably holds truer than ever.

Not that it immediately warms my heart, or should warm anybody's heart, to the music on La Di Da Di. It is consistently interesting and consistently «classy», but there ain't much progress here: Battles are too clever to re-write their melodies, but not too clever to break through their math-rock formulas. It's like the next step after Kraftwerk — Kraftwerk wrote humanistic music from a robotic perspective, and these guys write robotic music from a humanistic perspective. And who can really understand these robots? My best attempts to «visualize» this album see it as a long journey, maybe a digital one, that a pack of very determined, very tightly focused robotic units undertakes from Point A to Point B, crossing various obstacles along the way. In fact, it does sound very much like a soundtrack to an arcade game of jumping, dodging, and hitting, stretched across 12 levels of varying length and complexity.

Few reviews of the album find sufficient strength to dwell in detail on any of the individual tracks, and for a good reason — of all Battles albums so far, this one has the least individuality on any of its tracks, although that does not necessarily make it the worst Battles album so far. I do have to observe that a lot of the tracks are structured like dialogs, usually between a low-pitched guitar, bass, or keyboard and a high-pitched instrument, which is probably this band's attempt to avoid accusations of «pretentiousness» or «indulgence» (such accusations are most commonly associa­ted with lengthy solo passages), but ultimately it makes an even stronger point in support of the «video game soundtrack» interpretation — you can imagine yourself as the high-pitched Hero, and your evil antagonist(s) as the low-pitched bastard(s) that you have to outsmart. And you have exactly 49 minutes and 13 seconds — ready, set, go.

In this capacity — a fun, adventurous, bouncy-bubbly-dynamic pseudo-video game soundtrack — I have no problem issuing a thumbs up rating for the album. I also like the idea that they are still largely using live drums and real guitars, instead of completely giving in to the seduction of electronics: contrary to what some of the reviewers have said, this does not provide «human warmth» to the compositions (because every possible effort has been made to simulate non-hu­ma­nity), but it does provide a certain aura of realism to the proceedings. It's as in, which one do you prefer, a robot behind an actual drumkit or a drum machine? I'd definitely go for the former, although that's just me.

Battles: Gloss Drop

BATTLES: GLOSS DROP (2011)

1) Africastle; 2) Ice Cream; 3) Futura; 4) Inchworm; 5) Wall Street; 6) My Machine; 7) Dominican Fade; 8) Sweetie & Shag; 9) Toddler; 10) Rolls Bayce; 11) White Electric; 12) Sundome.

With Tyondai Braxton out of the collective Battles in order to wage an individualistic battle of his own, the band loses some of the guitar dexterity — but, in fortuitous compensation, also dumps the annoying chipmunk vocals, replacing them with a few guest vocal spots (including veteran electronic rocker Gary Numan, among others), but mostly with nothing. Now they can lay a real serious claim to being real serious about what they are doing.

Let us try and unravel this step-by-step. First things first, they continue to have — and now they are moved right up front — Very. Loud. Drums. If we were to judge everything based on first impressions, the obvious thing to say would be that Gloss Drop is basically that Who album that Keith Moon had always wanted to make, only the others were way too tough for him to capture all the attention. Well, nobody here is too tough for John Stanier, who is filling up every crank and nook he lays his eye upon with crash-boom-bangs of Gargantuan force and Wilhelm Tellian precision. Eventually, it begins to get tiresome (fifty minutes of getting relentlessly bashed on the head can plant muted hatred even towards the awesomest of drummers), but it helps a lot if you decide to sit through the whole thing in two or three small portions.

Second, the overall difference between Mirrored and Gloss Drop is not quite as large as some critics decided to see it. Behind the drums, for the most part, we find the same «mathematically» laid out keyboard patterns that are more characteristic of typical electronic than rock music. 'Fu­tu­ra', or 'Wall Street', or 'Inchworm' — these sound like outtakes from Mirrored, no better and no worse than that album's general level.

Third, Battles prove their ongoing commitment to merging the accessible with the head-shifting by releasing 'Ice Cream' as their first single. Co-written with the Santiago-born Matias Aguayo, it is basically a Latin dance song gone mad — as if all the instruments somehow got out from under their masters' control and simply go on sparring with each other. There are so many overdubs and subtle volume level trickery (I believe) that it is impossible to cling on to one particular instru­ment or even one particular voice: in giving it a few tries, I almost literally felt the poor head swirling and splitting, and had to stop it immediately. They also give it a try on the poppy number 'Sweetie & Shag', with Kazu Makino from Blonde Redhead contributing lead vocals (or, more precisely, phantom vocals), but that song has less stuff going on and thus, not such an immediate threat to one's psychic sanity.

None of this implies that we are about to gain a much better understanding of or appreciation for whatever the hell it is that Battles continue to do so well. The album as a whole, in my mind, would make for a perfect soundtrack to a documentary on cubism, what with the band's focusing so tightly on quasi-polygonic modelling of their music (and the geometry can be of an almost hel­lish complexity, but it's still geometry); but this still does not answer the question, since it is not to be implied that we actually understand a doggone thing about cubism.

Gloss Drop is louder, busier, more self-assured and dominative than Mirrored, which bothers me, because if this is the way I'm going to be dominated in the future, I'd at least like to know what the hell it is that domi­nates me? Do not trust any of the reviews that seem to pretend as if they know the answer. Okay, the Gary Numan-led 'My Machine' has a lot of industrial boom to it and may be decoded as, uh, eh, an apocalyptic technological nightmarish whatchamacallit. Okay, 'Africastle' does sound African in some of its rhythms and then becomes evil-gloomy in its last section ("castle", right? Fantasy-film medieval castle? Torture racks? Iron maidens?). Okay, 'Tod­dler' is one minute of rhythmless keyboard sweetness. Does that answer the question «Who are Battles and what sort of battles do they represent»?

Most accounts of Gloss Drop I have read do not ask questions. «Good fun», «cool grooves», etc., rule the positive energy waves, but I can neither feel the fun nor get in the groove. With this al­bum, Battles have veered much further into unknown territory than even King Crimson, whose «disciplined» sound was still very much rooted in the well-known rock idiom. That is their big selling point — wondering about this album is like wondering about an oddly shaped alien device dropped on the planet, without having the faintest idea about its purposes, all the while admiring its out-of-the-ordinariness. But even the alien device has got a purpose, goddammit, we just don't know it. Does Gloss Drop have a purpose? Or am I giving these guys way too much credit, over­stating their unusualness when, in reality, they are just having good clean fun?

Whatever the answer, I have never managed to solve a Rubik's Cube, but I deeply respect every­one who did, which logically leads me to a thumbs up for this album. Or, perhaps, it is just be­cause of the drummer guy. After all, nobody messes with that drummer guy — one bass drum punch out there is a solid equivalent of a kick in the head by a Clydesdale horse.

Check "Gloss Drop" (CD) on Amazon
Check "Gloss Drop" (MP3) on Amazon

Battles: Mirrored

MIRRORED (2007)

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.

Every now and then, one of the latest «cool» bands releases an album where it intentionally mixes the cool and the immediate with the artsy and the meandering, and a large chunk of the critics cries out something like «Prog-rock is back, but this is just about the only way we could ever like it!» and then the cool band fades away and the other cool band comes in and does the same thing in a different way and gets the exact same response. Had Jon (or Ian, for that matter) Anderson been born twenty years later and started off in some obscure indie rock band in Sheffield or Okla­homa City, they might have been luckier with their tattered critical legacies.

With Mirrored, Battles have entered trickier territory than their much more minimalistic EPs could ever suggest; the critics paused, wavered, then, for the most part, gave the green light, be­cause, after all, those guys do not take themselves too seriously, and that's exactly what matters. How exactly they do take themselves is another matter. Nobody really knows. But everybody's intrigued. Could this, like, be the future of rock'n'roll... again?

The lead hit single, 'Atlas', is a little bit rock'n'roll, for certain. Its kid-martial rhythm paired with garbled chipmunk vocals is pure novelty, per se, but it is only an integral part of a far more chal­lenging structure, with buildups, fadeouts, external riffs coming in and going away, and a jarring industrial loop to finish things off — definitely more ambitious than just a modern twist on 'The Chipmunk Song'. Besides, it is hardly typical of the entire album: its chipmunkish hook is one of the most obvious, as befits the lead single, but, overall, it is simpler than the rest, and the happi­ness quotient is way too high. Mirrored isn't exactly a depressing or aggressive experience, but neither is it an ode to joy.

A few tracks almost sound like a more collected, rhythmic (and cleaner-recorded) Animal Collec­tive: trippy textures from outer space to blow the minds of inferior life forms, only set to rhythms that the life forms can really dance to (most are tricky in terms of signature, yet manageable ne­vertheless), like 'Ddiamondd', for instance, or the shamanistic vocal part of 'Rainbow'. But since the bulk of the band, after all, consists of real guitarists playing real guitars, we all know these similarities may not last too long. Sooner or later, the band enters real-music-playing mode, and then they become the modern day's Gentle Giant.

What they do not really share is prog-rock's love for dissonance and atonality, nor do they sup­port the ideology of «stop, shift to a different rhythm, melody, and tempo, play for ten seconds, stop, repeat, do while .T.». Entire seven/eight-minute pieces like 'Tonto' can stay glued to the same rhythm throughout, as if they were some inoffensive, unnoticeable chillout offering, but be­hind that rhythm, different melodies actually shift on a continual basis; the peak of this madness arrives near the end of the album with 'Tij', a sweaty, funky composition, like a fast-going King Crimson number from the early Eighties sped up at twice the norm.

In addition to still not caring about «song-ifying» any of their music, Battles may have another Achilles' heel: it is exactly their lighter elements — the chipmunk vocals, the care­free whistling on 'Race In' and suchlike — that may prevent many people from taking them seriously rather than dismissing them as the ten millionth novelty act to come our way, much like John Zorn's Naked City could have a hard time gaining recognition with «true» jazz fans for being influenced by the likes of Napalm Death.

And I, too, do not think that every idea they come up with on Mirrored is perfect, if only because there is so much. Nor do I claim to understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. Nor do I make a solemn promise that I will want to relisten to this at least once a year, nor would I bet ten dollars on the album becoming a timeless classic for the ages. But I do admit that this kind of sound — this kind of idea, to take a bunch of real instruments, make them sound like Electronica, and then streamline the whole thing into the direction of complex artsiness — is a solid, and potentially quite captivating, creative achievement of the human spirit. Will it lead us on to Mars and Jupiter? I am not sure. Probably not. But it does justify the band haughtily assum­ing its given name, and for that particular blistering moment in 2007, that was fairly well enough. Thumbs up — were the brain disallowed to offer that judgement, what other album, strictly brain-wise, would be more deserving of it?

Battles: EP C / B EP

BATTLES: EP C / B EP (2006)

1) B + T; 2) UW; 3) HI/LO; 4) IPT-2; 5) TRAS 2; 6) SZ2; 7) TRAS 3; 8) IPT 2; 9) BTTLS; 10) DANCE.

First of all, the track listing you see is incorrect in relation to the album EP C / B EP that Battles released in 2006. That album was indeed a combination of their two earlier EPs, to each of which they, however, appended one new track ('FANTASY' and 'TRAS' respectively). The order was also reversed: on the album EP C / B EP it is B EP that comes first and EP C comes next, which is sort of like the order you'd expect them to follow, but originally, in 2004, it was EP C that was released first and B EP followed it a few months later. For the record, there never was an A EP or EP A, either. Now that everything is as transparent and lucid as the Poincaré conjecture, let us speak freely of these geniuses of math-rock.

Ever since Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew crossed their guitars in the early 1980s, there have been plenty of followers trying to paint comparable musical polygons in the air, but few succeed, since, without an emotional interpretation, a musical polygon is nothing but firm proof of the fact that a bunch of pretentious and stubborn shitheads have indeed wasted a few dozen kilohours of their time learning to play that way (when they could have spent that same time in a far more use­ful manner — say, cleaning up the latest oil spill with a bucket and a shovel).

But these guys, a quasi-supergroup that unites people from math rock band Don Caballero and alt-metal band Helmet with the son of Anthony Braxton, truly have what it takes. The sound­scapes they create are weird, but not pointless, and complex, but not inacessible. Most important­ly, it has all the magic of trance without being trance — too slow, too sparse, too guitar-depen­dent, and way too technical, of course. Yet, once you get in their groove, the hypnosis starts wor­king, and the chakras start opening.

The sound is much more «sci-fi», with a touch of «industrial», than «psychedelic» — which is quite natural if the music completely lacks the element of free improvisation, governed by succes­sive amassment of layers of loops that, however, never mesh in a kaleidoscopic manner, but stric­tly whirl around on their own like a set of cogs. But the more it turns, the more you may get to feel yourself caught up in those cogs and turning along with them, clinging, against your will, to one of the instruments. There is something nasty and humiliating about that approach, perhaps, but we'll just assume it's all in good fun.

Some of the tracks are short one-minute links — raw ideas, perhaps, that never got the luck of being tested further — but the emphasis is on the long, drawn out compositions. 'B + T' and 'HI / LO' are so mesmerizing that it doesn't really matter they have more or less the same tempo and mood; 'TRAS 2' is the album's «fast rocker» that allows you to switch gears while sleepwalking; and I even think that 'BTTLS', the record's most vilified track, does the «imagine yourself trapped in the control room of a futuristic space station, listening to all the panels and engines» far more efficiently than anything on those early Kraftwerk albums. Not that it really needs to break the twelve minute mark, but there is something creepy about those sound effects — you almost keep waiting for something to blow up at any moment. (Alas, it never does, although it does get louder towards the end).

The big secret behind all this is that their loops have actual resonance, and their combinations have even more of it — they're speaking to each other, like the «low voice» of 'HI/LO's synthe­sized bass against the «high voice» of the whining chimes above it. They threaten, complain, or just mindlessly chirp about like a set of electronic birds; «math-rock» this may be, but it is as good as any a justification of the idea that mathematics and soulfulness are not mutually exclu­sive. It is, perhaps, too bad that, unlike King Crimson, Battles do not transform any of those nice sounds into actual songs — they might reach a far bigger audience that way — but, on the other hand, if it works, it works, so let's not even breathe on it. Thumbs up at a crossroads where the interests of the brain and the heart intersect with each other.