Everything is strange about this record. It’s a minimal maths rock, experimental electronic work where sparseness and hypnotic repetition provide the drive and intensity as opposed to volume or dynamics. Tracks are either incredibly short or seem to endlessly cycle burrowing deeper and deeper into your skull. To some extent it doesn’t feel like music made by humans. It’s so tightly regimented, taking its cue from highly sequenced early electronic music yet feeling like deconstructed rock music, where some of the crutches have been stripped away and we’re left with the bare minimum. Battles are a live band, driven by guitarist Ian Williams (Don Caballero) and featuring experimental musician Tynodi Braxton, David Konopka (Lynx) and drummer John Stanier, known for his skin bashing with Helmet and Tomahawk. Releasing their music on a series of EP’s that have been compiled here, their live shows have generated considerable buzz overseas due to the fact that Battles seem like a logical extension or perhaps antidote to post rock’s egocentric excesses, incorporating a stripped down no nonsense rock feel that’s become so popular these days, gutting it and dragging it kicking and screaming into a world of early electronic discovery and experimental minimalism. It’s looped webs of guitars, impossibly accurate percussion with a deep soulful groove, warm organs played almost inhumanly, and some disorientating postproduction trickery, abrupt panning between speakers, and backward masked weirdness. It’s strange and very different to everything else that’s happening, but who knows perhaps Battles are the future. We can only hope.
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