Riffs, Rants & Rumours: Battles Slim Down And Shine On 'Gloss Drop'

posted in: Features • Music News • Rock

When Battles frontman Tyondai Braxton quit the band about a year and a half ago to concentrate on his solo career, leaving behind an and-then-there-were-three scenario, it was certainly reasonable to assume that the move might have been a death knell for the group. The three remaining Battlers announced their intentions to continue, but without the wildly inventive Braxton on board, their future looked like an uphill climb at best. While Battles certainly seemed like a collective effort, it was impossible to deny the notion that Braxton”who seemingly inherited some of his iconoclastic spark from his father, avant-jazz legend Anthony Braxton”had a fair bit to do with the sound that earned so much attention on the foursome’s 2007 debut album, Mirrored.

Nevertheless, Dave Konopka, Ian Williams and John Stanier have beaten the odds on their first album as a trio, Gloss Drop. Battles 2011 may be a smaller band, but they make as big a noise as ever. To be honest, they don’t sound hugely different from the Braxton-era lineup. That’s not to suggest that the second Battles album is in any way a rehash of its predecessor, simply to praise the current incarnation of the band for picking up the hefty amount of slack left in the wake of Braxton’s departure.

Of course, the most immediate and obvious difference is that Braxton was, among other things, Battles’ mouthpiece. Granted, much of their sound was focused on instrumental interaction, but the question of what to do about vocals must surely have been an elephant in the band’s rehearsal room. Go all-instrumental? Let one of the remaining members try their hand at singing? Bring in a new member for the job? On Gloss Drop, Battles bypasses all of these options by partnering up with various guest vocalists for a third of the tracks and leaving the rest wordless. And quite a wide-ranging lineup of guests it is at that: Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead, Yamantaka Eye of The Boredoms, South American DJ/singer Matias Aguayo and…wait for it…Gary Numan.

Before we go any further in describing Gloss Drop, though, this would be an excellent time to point out a chronic fallacy about Battles. Despite popular misconceptions (or myth conceptions), they are not a math-rock band. Never have been, probably never will be. Admittedly, both Williams and Konopka have done time in legit math-rock outfits (Don Caballero, Storm and Stress, Lynx), and yes, the Battles sound does include challenging instrumental passages and tricky time signatures, but that’s pretty much where the connections end. If anything, Battles are second-generation post-rockers (even we’re not ready for the term post-post-rockers), taking up the torch of inventive, unpredictable, boundary-crashing music from ’90s indie-rock heroes like Tortoise, Isotope 217, et al, and using it to light the path to a new direction.

This was true of the band that made Mirrored, and it’s true today on Gloss Drop. Battles’ inclusionary approach on their second album applies not only to the aforementioned guest list, but also to a kaleidoscopic sound that freely draws on prog, hip hop, minimalism, metal, fusion, pop, electronica, Caribbean flavors, African and Brazilian grooves, and on and on until you’re forced to stop logging the influences and simply experience the band’s approach as a whole. Still, for all their quirkiness and eclecticism, the vocal cuts on Gloss Drop ought to be able to curry favor with anyone enamored of, say, Deerhoof, and in an indie-rock landscape where the likes of Dirty Projectors and Tune-Yards are deemed accessible, even the album’s most off-kilter instrumental tracks shouldn’t seem too far beyond the pale.

But ultimately, it’s not really important whether Battles can build on the Next Big Thing status they earned with their debut record four years ago. Such distinctions are fleeting at best. In the long run, what matters the most is that instead of falling apart when an important puzzle piece was removed from their midst, they found a new way to fit together, and Gloss Drop is the sound of the next step in the journey they refuse to abandon.