Battles

The Battles, a New York-based supergroup formed by Don Caballero's and Storm & Stress' guitarist Ian Williams jazz composer and vocalist Tyondai Braxton Helmet's drummer John Stanier, bassist Dave Konopka (formerly the guitarist for Lynx who had penned Lynx in 2001), delivered classy lessons in instrumental post-rock on the EPs EP C (Monitor, 2004) and Tras Fantasy (Cold Sweat, 2004).

Mirrored (Warp, 2007) single-handedly reinvented post-rock for the 21st century. It appropriated dance rhythms, jazz improvisation and digital editing to craft erudite and intricate compositions that harked back to the Canterbury school of progressive-rock of the 1970s.
However, the very first quality displayed by the very first song, Race - In (a childish interplay over frantic Brazilian polyrhythms) is "playfulness". Ddiamondd even flirts with Gong's exhuberant dementia. The seven-minute Atlas starts from there, from a silly nursery rhyme sung through a distorting device, that later is drowned in tribal repetition and hard-rock riffs only to resurrect in all its Walt Disney-ian glory.
The other quality that is soon evident is the process of slow deterioration via quasi-minimalist repetition. The eight-minute Tonto's brisk pace straddles the unlikely border between native-american pow-wow and Chinese opera while it is actually dying out. Bad Trails cuts and pastes a loop of vocals and birds over a bubbling electronic soundscape. Another eight-minute piece, Rainbow, revolves around dissonant videogame-like sounds, stand-alone guitar distortions and hysterical drumming that undergoes a series of phases, from loud to almost silent back to loud until it ends, totally incoherently, with a minute of "acid" singing a` la Grateful Dead.
The precursors of this creative blend of technology, jazz and dancing were This Heat. However, the Battles project a completely different vision, as if they were physically inhabiting a different planet: instead of the post-industrial apocalypse, they showed a cartoonish music-hall of cheerful subhumans.
The quality that is hardest to discern is the meticulous process of collage, that is relatively unusual in a rock context. TIJ begins with industrial noise but suddenly turns into a festive jam and ends in a pure percussive fit. Throughout the piece countless deviant events are glued to the main stream of music.

The Battles created and stored sounds on their laptops as the (multi-faceted) voice of an additional instrument. In parallel, they employed digital devices to generate the loops of guitar and bass lines.

Battles' second album Gloss Drop (Warp, 2011) lost Tyondai Braxton, replaced by a number of guest vocalists. The instrumental Africastle is three pieces in one: an introduction of guitar effects, a frenzied Brazilian dance and a humorous synth skit. On the other hand the fractured electronic Latin-funk beats of Ice Cream wed Chilean vocalist and producer Matias Aguayo to deliver a very focused and compact song. So does the instrumental and album standout Futura, although its vaudevillian pace masks a mesmerizing guitar workout that reads like a vocabulary of anti-pop. Rolls Bayce is another instrumental novelty that creates a surreal carnival-like atmosphere. The "tropical" theme runs through the album, from the instrumental Inchworm (in which the keyboards emulate steel drums) to the torrential (and aimless) jam White Electric.
The combo seems more interested in eclectic interbreeding than in the complex austere architectures of the first album. Hence the symphonic scherzo Wall Street, residing somewhere between Frank Zappa and Modest Mussorgsky,
If there is an attempt to reach the masses, Gary Numan sinks in the cyclic (and tedious) industrial music of My Machines, and Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino tries in vain to couple her imitation of French ye-ye girls of the 1960s with prog-rock tumult and ever shifting context in Sweetie & Shag.
Yamantaka Eye of the Boredoms (certainly not a pop singer) teaches both a lesson in Sundome by joining a demented Pere Ubu-inspired pow-wow dance with vocal subhuman exclamations.
Overall, this album is more groove-oriented, lightweight and cosmopolitan than the debut.

La di da (Warp, 2015) adds The Yabba to their canon but the rest of the album sounds improvised, unfinished, and indulgent.

Reduced to the duo of John Stanier and Ian Williams, the Battles returned with Juice B Crypts (Warp, 2019), that features a number of guest vocalists: the Yes' John Anderson, Sal Principato of new wave group Liquid Liquid, Tune-YaRDs, Shabazz Palaces, and (best of all) Xenia Rubinos. The album, again, suffers from inconsistency Ambulance and Fort Greene Park are passable, but the rest is filler.