Battles
May 28 (8 pm). Starlite Room, 10030-102 St.
If a success story stood out from the sub-strata of pop music in 2007, it was the emergence of New York quartet Battles as the purveyors of a radical, yet accessible new sound. Garnering stunning reviews across the board from mainstream and indie press alike, the release of their debut full-length album Mirrored did everything short of galvanizing unruly legions of bloggers and music sites into a taste-making consensus. This was the sort of near unanimous opinion that officiated Radiohead during the Kid A era and more recently the genre plays of Holy Fuck; both bands heralded for bringing disparate dimensions of music into new eras of possibility.
The genre identity crisis bestowed upon Battles by the press was the most recurrent theme throughout album reviews for Mirrored. The odd time signatures and tempos were construed as math rock, the predominance of former Helmet drummer Jon Stanier’s rhythms were motorik kraut rock, the tidal layers of converging vocal manipulations and synths, post-rock. Mike Driver of Drowned in Sound confidently heralded “Atlas” as one of the best dance singles of the year, while NME critic Loius Patton described the song as a conceptual exercise that goes “from rock, to rave, back to rock.”
Essentially a product of the combination of creative talents of four practiced musicians, categorical description became something of a game between the band and journalists. Vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Tyondai Braxton commented in a to web music news zine Tiny Mix Tapes that “to define somebody by a single quality you think exists in their music, and then only define them as that, I think is dangerous. I think it marginalizes what musicians do.”
Attempts to explain the band resorted to an exercise in illustrating the predominant theme of hybridism in modern music. The boldest, most enthralling dimension in Battles’ songs is the relationship between digital and analogue sound. Pitchfork scribe Jess Harvell went so far as to contend that “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.” Indeed, the accurate integration of effects processing and real-time sampling into frenetic numbers like “Ddiamondd” and “Snare Hanger” reveal a technical proficiency that could only be termed cybernetic in its essence.
Stanier’s live drums, and rolling bass lines of Dave Konopka maintain the feeling that you’re walking on solid prog rock ground throughout most of the album, but the twisted electronic synth gestures provided by keyboardist Ian Williams reveal the band’s virtual tendencies. Youtube footage of the band playing “Race” live in Vancouver shows Williams and Braxton looping riffs and spilling extemporal hooks from delay units onto keys in a virtuosic display of electro-rock multitasking. This symbiotic relationship between organic and mechanic isn’t total though; tracks like “Tonto” are more primary in their process of supposed robotic development, coming off more like creatively written melodic experiments than the music of tomorrow.
“That’s sort of a media tagline”, Williams remarked last year to The Phoenix with regards to Battles being termed a futuristic project. “In a way, it’s really just a natural expression of what you can do with the tools of the trade at this point”.
Maybe our attempts to define a sound composed so articulately of influences from the past and the possible future stems ultimately from a desire to understand our fleeting selves in the ever-changing environment of the present. Whatever it is, really, in the scope of pop-music history, little has ever been more exiting and appealing than the unexplainable, or indescribable.
