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.

What makes Mississauga so fascinating, though, is the way that such lyrics don’t seem to fight for attention, but just simply rest on the (very catchy) melodies. Punk bands for years have been singing the same sort of things and, often in Germany, sometimes dramatizing them on-stage. But in those cases, sensationalism and emphasis are the key traits. For the Hidden Cameras, the opposite is true. And what makes this new disc even more powerful is the way in which “he swallowed my pee” can be followed two songs later by “We Oh We,” which sounds like the “quiet song” at a contemporary church service. If F. Scott Fitzgerald’s maxim about the true test of intelligence can be extended to albums as well, then Mississauga is a pretty damn smart album; but, like all smarts, it’s only bound to appreciated by a select few.

—Drew C. Ashwood

Encore

Eminem

Aftermath Records

It’s Friday now and that means it’s been almost a week since ODB died of presumed heart failure in a Brooklyn recording studio. Which is absolutely horrible, because as great as Eminem is, ODB was greater—wilder, looser, more natural and generally less packed with baggage. There’s some rot in Eminem, some ugly bitterness and insecurity that has not gone away despite his enormous popularity. He wasn’t cool in high school, in other words (see “Oh Foolish Pride” a.k.a. the “Source Racist Tape”), and even though he’s pretty cool now, the resentment’s still in him and it colors everything he does. The new album is a demonstratively detached exercise in dorky weirdness and juvenile mockery—a bit like his first album, but dramatically different because of everything we’ve found out about him since.

With such familiarity comes a danger though, and with 2002’s The Eminem Show, Marshall Mathers backed himself into a corner, exhausting the cache of material about his family, his past and his celebrity, and leaving himself with precious little to work with. The 8 Mile stuff was amazing because he suddenly had a story to rap about, and his recent diss tracks against Murder Inc. and Benzino were great for the same reason. Now, with Encore, he’s all alone again, and at times, he sounds like he’s trying to squeeze blood out of rocks, reaching desperately for inspiration, or at the very least, a decent punch line.

The fierce roar he appropriated in the years since his last record has been largely replaced with a coy mumble, as if he’s sleeptalking his lines from a couch in the studio instead of spitting them passionately into a mic. Just like his harshest critics, he’s a bit bored with himself, and if the apologetic “Like Toy Soldiers” is any indication, the 32year old is starting to get embarrassed of his younger self. His recent interviews, in which he sounds reflective, somber and eerily father-like, seem to support this, but because Eminem will always have to be Eminem, such change must be presented thoughtfully and strategically. So he does the logical thing, filling the new record with a slew of hilariously regressive, yet stunningly witty jokes that would feel just as comfortable on The Slim Shady LP as they would on any of Weird Al’s records. Suddenly he’s being selfdeprecating, calling himself gay, stupid and whiny, but before we start laughing too hard at him, he flips the tables and nails us for liking him so much in the first place. On “Rain Man,” the bizarre distillation of the entire album, he finishes with a killer line: “I don’t even gotta make no goddamn sense—I just did a whole song and I didn’t say shit!” Joke’s on us for loving every second of it, in other words, and joke’s on The New York Times for taking it as seriously as they started to after he got the Oscar.

Yet, recent years have forced Eminem out of the closet as nothing but a big, worried nerd. Despite all his efforts, he’s never been successful at convincing people he was carefree. And as much as we tried to repress our intuitions, we always wanted to ask him why, if he really had as little to prove as he claimed, he felt compelled to talk about it so much. He’s crushingly smart though, and because he knows exactly what he sounds like, he plays up the tension, pitting his intimidating bravado against his obvious insecurity. It’s the same tension that kept characters like Sal Paradise and Holden Caulfield interesting to us when we were sixteen, and Eminem is compelling for the same reasons. Certainly, the joke runs thin sometimes, and his inability to strike a balance between unabashed silliness (“Ass Like That”) and heavy handed seriousness (“Mosh”) is frustrating. But his flow is only getting better, his rhymes more intricately wound and although his beats are often still rather dreary, he’s doing amazing things with his voice and his hooks. The vocal rhythms on opener “Evil Deeds,” for instance, only make sense once you’ve heard them 10 times, and the chorus of the Kim-targeted “Puke” is more dramatic and more sinister than anything he’s written since, well, “Kim.”

In spite of everything, people will hate Encore. Fairweather fans, I say, and not because it’s a bad album—but because Eminem is going through troubles more profound than any he’s ever faced before. Taken for all its awkwardness and self-conscious anxiety, Encore is the dirtied summary of an existential crisis—a tumultuous internal battle that Eminem will undoubtedly resolve on his next, most likely classic, and most likely final album. In the meantime, he shoots his entire audience with a pistol at the end of the record and laughs hysterically.

—Leon Neyfakh