The minimalist, electronic rock group Battles has had EPs out for years, but their first full-length album finally came out in 2007. Mirrored plays with time signature, rhythm, and dissonance, often leading into a melody after several measures of seeming freelancing. The pattern gives the album a chaotic sound, connoting lust for the undiscovered or unaccepted, much like several of the numbers in Radiohead's Kid A.
The grunge element darkens and roughens the sound, and the washed out, high-pitched vocals (resembling a keyboard more than the human voice) round out the sharper edges.
Ambiguous, Artistic Lyrics of Mirrored
Atlas opens the album as the first song with lyrics. It serves as an introduction to the band by describing what are perhaps their own personal thoughts toward their sound. They sing, "people won't be people when they hear this sound that's been glowing in the dark at the edge of the town." The song discusses both how they believe they are coming across (as an electronic band with a new sound that alters people), and the lies that the people are accustomed to - "Singer is a crook, who eh oh, the chorus full of actors."
Ddiamondd throws several images together - a shattered mirror, a diamond, a prism, melting water and splitting light into colored bars. A moment of enlightened clarity comes to the narrator in the description, where your dream becomes "such an entity in your reflection, you are the dream to it, you are the prism." Though, anxiety builds as we see the diamond (or is it a broken mirror?) reflecting too many corners of the other mirrors to count. In the end, the speaker is so overwhelmed by the connections between the broken images and himself/herself, that the speaker must ask, "am I in the mirror? Am I what you have been staring at, am I a diamond?...am I a reflection of an enemy, just like a reflection of a friend of mine?"
The nature of the lyrics is to be experimental and break the rules of easy listening - much like the nature of the music. The lyrics flow as sharply and distorted as the music, containing moments of fear, spiritual awakening, anticipation, societal criticism, and even peace.
Battles On Tour
As per their myspace blog, Battles is planning on touring in Warp20 in New York, September 3-6. They will be joined by !!!, Prefuse 73, Pivot, and Warp20 DJs. The lead singer, Tyondai Braxton, is also organizing some orchestral experimental music that is scheduled to be out in September and can be found on his personal myspace page.
Battles' successful album is keeping grunge fans in waiting for more electronic math rock fun.
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