Battles – Gloss Drop

New York’s Battles are a unique band. Their debut album, Mirrored, was full of ingenuity and things we hadn’t heard before from any of its component parts; even the last Don Cab album that featured guitarist Ian Williams, American Don, which had all the precursors and shades of Battles to come, wasn’t as varied and as multifaceted as the new group. Chalk that up to (now former) band member Tyondai Braxton, whose level of influence over the album’s sound may have been nebulous to first-time listeners, as Williams’ fits of fancy could take him any direction without seeming out of place. Upon hearing Gloss Drop, it is apparent how strong a voice- literally his voice- Braxton had in the band. Maybe not a consciously steering hand, but rather a catalyst for the rest of the band to be more audacious and a little more adventurous than they might have been. Now, without his presence, Battles have sunk into a routine, building a steady albeit unconventional rhythm, intertwining guitar and keyboard riffs, each component player riffing a bit on what’s been previously built, and then tapering out near the end. The riffs and rhythms are interesting, but often overstay their welcome, and as a whole start to blend into each other. The real highlights of the album come when they have a vocalist to play off of, Braxton’s hole being filled with four vocalists in this case: Matias Aguayo, synth-pop pioneer Gary Numan, Kazu Makino of shoegaze veterans Blonde Redhead, and Yamantaka Eye of Japanese noise weirdos The Boredoms. Each of these tracks stands as a more unique, more interesting piece of work than any of the non-vocal tracks on the album, and really illustrate how much a voice can add, or how much the lack of one can detract. (Warp, www.warp.net) David Nowacki