BATTLES @ Princeton

Whilst staggering through a typical night of thesis-crunchtime caffeinated haze, I managed to find myself at Princeton's own Terrace F. Club on a certain Thursday night. After putting in long hours in the lab I needed a break. And what to my wondrous ears should appear? Twas BATTLES, who mission to rock was clear.



BATTLES are a band from New York who play very technically challenging instrumental music, in a style often dubbed "math rock." I'd caught wind of them not too long ago due to some high praise blog posts anticipating their debut album on May 22nd. Even though this will their first proper album, the band has generated a lot of buzz from their three EPs over the last 4 years and an intense live show which I can attest is a marvelous display of musical prowess.

Front and center was the drumkit. At the helm was an awkwardly out of place 50 year old dude who was apparantly the former drummer for Helmet. I only ever remember hearing one Helmet song ("Unsung") from back in my high school, grunge-obsessed, 98 Rock days. I remember it coming on the radio only rarely and late at night, as if it was one of those songs the DJ actually wanted to play, but 2am was the only time he could avoid the usual crap he was forced to play. Even now, that song still rocks, in no small part on account of the drums. And damn, that old dude could drum! The best thing was that his crash cymbal was on this really tall stand, like 10 feet up, so he had to reach up really high every time he hit it. It's little touches like this that really made the band's performance interesting. Automatically, you could understand their inventiveness, and it did not come at the expense of their music.

Flanking the drums were two guys at keyboard/laptop stations - one sported a big fro. These guys demonstrated the highly technologic aspect of the band. Each had an elaborate setup of mixers, loopers, vocoders, and digital mystery boxes to go along with their laptop/keyboard setups. Even more impressive was that they both picked up the axe from time to time and played guitar and keyboard simultaneously while adjusting the other gizmos at their disposal. In the back was the guitarist/bassist who spent the majority of time perfecting the sounds of the band member on the slew of analog dials on their amplifiers.

Despite all this talk of technical and robotic sounding rhythms the band really gels together creating tight grooves that chug along like a well-oiled machine. My friend Keith said it best as he came up to me during the ominous bass synth of their wicked single "Atlas": "Man these dudes are fucking heavy!" True to his words their sound is really thick and foreboding, but it is also fun as revealed by the vocal textures on the same song. And you could definitely tell these guys were having fun playing this stuff. Watch out for BATTLES! On May 22nd Mirrored will be out!