Battles
Mirrored

THE REVIEW

It is becoming increasingly rare and difficult for me to find an album to listen to from start to finish without feeling an irritating sense of deep boredom. And so I feel like a sort of miracle has happened when I put on the freshly released new album by Battles, 'Mirrored,' and I experience a surge of amused excitement.

To tell the truth, the reaction came on the second listen; on the first, the opening of "race in" left me with the bitter taste of the usual self-referentiality that, even though post rock is 15 years old, still tries to pass off as innovative. But then, on the second listen, I get to touch "atlas" and "ddiamondd," the second and third tracks, respectively. And I can't detach myself from the album anymore; I go straight to the end because here, we're actually talking about something else. The problem with "Race in", a fitting introduction, is that it hearkens back to the past. It still references Math as the undeniable base of Battles, but they have evolved. Indeed. What remains is that explicitly rationalistic approach, the systematic framing and squaring, that almost twelve-tone transporting of harmonic intervals as such. But now, there's also intent in the programmatic, not just the language. And in intent, Battles become the very concept of destabilization.

They take funk, electronic, hardcore, post, and destroy them under the ax blows of a serial killer who is also a typical obsessive maniac, one who wears a suit and tie by day. Their sound is not, in fact, auditory violence, but the dark side of unpredictability, of the sound you don't expect, of dynamic or tempo changes. Yet, it is never freewheeling but always constrained within the theme, forced into repetition. Thus their music is an attempt at control that fails, a system that flaws, an appearance that always implies a dark side, even more terrifying because it is never free, never truly unconscious or instinctive. In other words, this rational/irrational contrast, both imperfect and incomplete, can be found in the clash and fusion of synthesized and human sounds, the former always imperfect in their attempt to square and thus rationalize everything typical of electronics because they are mixed and dissected by a human hand that is always perceptible, the latter in turn stripped down by a paroxysmal attempt to always bring them back to a "robotic" interpretation, indeed squared and "monotimbral".

It is music that SEEMS reasoned, but always denies its expressed rationality. In essence, the intrinsic essence of Battles is to be profoundly anti-positivist. For this reason, they are absolutely contrary to tendencies and uncomfortable. Their music is, first and foremost, mocking, and philosophically the opposite of everything that justifies itself only by its existence in other times.