B EP

Battles

(Dim Mak Records)

B EP, the triumphant junior effort of the experimental math post-rock group Battles, is as intelligent and compelling as it is weird. The quartet, featuring John Stanier of Helmet and Ian Williams of Don Caballero, is not your ordinary band, with perplexing track names, a record called EP C that came out before B EP and whose website biography is a series of scrawled diagrams, pictures and drawings. Not content to be merely strange, they also produce incredible musical compositions—the instrumental songs on their latest album are strikingly diverse, both internally and against each other, with track lengths varying between 1:11 and 12:27 and sonic evocations from monastery hymns to industrial to glitch.

The nine-minute opener, “SZ2,” exemplifies this musical heterogeneity—after beginning with a background of quietly moody lo-fi strings, a heavily compressed guitar enters and begins to accumulate a steady rhythm that becomes set off by the inclusion of a tambourine and emerging discordant notes. The mood is abruptly shattered by an amazing intrusion of loud beating drums and heavily distorted guitar at 5:10. The groove that is created is shattered twice more in the song, as it switches gears to an extremely rapid drum beat accompanied by rock guitar and then again at 7:10 when the drums and guitar shift genre evocations to an almost upbeat ska sound. By the song’s end, the listener has no idea how he got from point A to point B, but in all of its abruptness, the transition somehow seems almost natural.

This long composition is followed by the album’s shortest tracks, which again show this rapid shifting of genres: “TRAS3,” containing heavily echoed psych guitars that with a little more echo could potentially be the moody background to a Tool song, puts the listener into a reverie which is startlingly succeeded by the immediate kick of loud and upbeat drums starting “IPT2,” which makes use of numerous heavily-effected guitar and synths, and ends after 1:49, right when it leads the listener to believe a climax is imminent.

This duo is followed by the longest and most intriguing piece, “BTTLS.” The song plays with the creation of mood and space via Neubaten-like organically metallic acoustic-industrial sounds, the violation of this space’s rules through rapidly repeating and panned clicks and cut-and-pasted sounds that pop in and out with no effort to hide their digital artifice or artificiality. Sounds unpredictably enter and exit the space, and an extremely creepy alien groaning/breathing noise pervades the background of the piece’s midsection. In the last third of the piece, deep resonant drums start beating, the background sounds cut out and frighteningly arrhythmic drums and cymbals destroy the mood that had been so laboriously created; again Battles break the rules of spatial resonance created by the background humming and air-sounds, which are punctuated with obvious computer effects and a wall of noise disconcertingly cutting in and out. These violations of spatial registers shake up the listener on a totally different level than mere quiet/loud alternations. Even more surprisingly, the song ends with a long, harmoniously resonant fade.

The last track on the five-song EP, “DANCE,” is unsurprisingly the most movement-inducing song on the album, though designed for a particularly spastic dancer—rapid, complex drums combine with the unabashedly digital cut-up of sound clips alongside the air intakes of a beatboxer and poppy organ melodies contrasting with atonal and arrhythmic guitar riffs. The song features possibly the first awesome beatboxing-breakdown in the history of music, and continually eludes predictability with vicissitudes of style and form, quiet regular parts followed by loud irregular parts, and a who-would-have-guessed it fade-out at the end. Considered altogether, the five songs on B EP are extraordinary and delectable sonic morsels, with their calculated intelligence in choice of timing space garnished by the postmodern genre-bending of their stylistic variations.

—Jim L. Fingal

Mississauga Goddam

The Hidden Cameras

Rough Trade Records

“…Cup of tea?” is the big question that most potential purchasers (downloaders, rippers, burners, etc.) should be asking themselves about Toronto-based the Hidden Camera’s new album Mississauga Goddam. Musically, the disc is eclectic, thick and often lavish—at times somewhere between Rufus Wainwright and Belle and Sebastian (“The Fear is On” and the charming opener “Doot Doot Ploot”), and at others, like Nick Drake on too much gin-spiked coffee (“B-Boy” and “That’s When the Ceremony Starts”). This alone may be too much for some, but unquestionably deserves a careful listen. Overall, the disc’s production has the fantastic ability to sound both overblown and restrained; sure, strings upon strings upon bells upon guitars upon pianos is more than any recording may need, but, here—somehow—not more than seems right.

Lyrically, however, Mississauga maybe a little much for a certain type of listener, delving deep into some homosexual imagery that may be off-putting, not because it’s homosexual, but rather because it’s awfully graphic. The squeamish will be thankful it’s often easy to miss on a casual spin: “Have already touched it / It builds the bone / Although I’ll never need it / It fills in the hole I know” is more in-joke than description, and though “I drank from the wine that came from inside / the heart of his meat and the splurge of his sweet” is a little more explicit, it’s still couched in enough euphemism to have gotten past the Breen Office or the FCC. However, there are exceptions for those who are paying close enough attention; lines like “I kissed his ugly gangly greens, he swallowed my pee” and “I want another enema” are likely to make some hit the scan-backwards button at least once.