Its album "Mirrored," is No. 2 on Metacritic's best-album chart for 2007. This is the video to "Atlas," the album's first "single." You can see/hear it live yourself Tuesday night when Battles headlines a show at RecordBar, 1020 Westport Road. Cover for the 18-and-older show is $8. Here's what our reviewer, Michael Judge, had to say about the album in his glowing four-star review:
One irony of popular music is that most of what is conceived as explicit futurism (anything from Joe Meek and Don Ellis to Gary Numan and Erasure) ends up being almost completely tied to its time. Put another way, Duran Duran doesn't sound like the future of pop music in 2007, it sounds like the appropriate musical byproduct of an era that also produced Reaganism and crack cocaine.
Bearing that in mind, it's a real accomplishment when a band can sound effortlessly futuristic and ahead of its time, and that is part of the achievement of Battles'
outstanding "Mirrored." A quartet including former members of Helmet, Lynx and Don Caballero, Battles' sound is getting tagged as "math rock," but that's a lazy characterization.
There are precious few hyperspeed 12-tone riffs to be found on "Mirrored," but there's plenty of groove, albeit a uniquely tweaked sort of groove. Battles has a twitchy energy and expertise with interlocking patterns that recall Talking Heads or '80s King Crimson, but they aren't new wave.
Its use of quirky vocal arrangements and ritualistic, almost religious, repetitions bring to mind Gentle Giant and Magma, but Battles isn't a prog group in any '70s sense of the word. Its music is a seamless melding of virtuosity, compositional finesse, and real-time electronic alterations.
Tyondai Braxton's heavily-modified vocal hooks are catchy, almost singsongy, but also thoroughly strange (check out "Atlas," the first single, or "Tonto"); drummer John Stanier employs feels ranging from slippery polymetrics to glammy stomps; and at certain junctures, it's almost impossible to tell what sounds are guitars, keyboards, and even voices. "Mirrored" is both lean and atmospheric, both heady and immediately enjoyable. What should you call it? No idea, but doesn't it sound great?
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