In a neat mirroring of their sound, the three members of Battles enter the stage separately.
A hunched-over Dave Konopka layers loop-upon-loop of effects, sending fragments of noise floating off across the Electric Ballroom. He’s then joined by Ian Williams, nonchalantly holding a guitar and surrounded by an array of synths. A syncopated, warped sound begins to come into focus, slowly building for five minutes. Finally, John Stanier, who has been lurking in the wings, arrives to provide propulsive percussion.
Suddenly, everything falls into place. Through the distortion, the fidgety, brutal groove of new song Dot Com bursts out. The band lock into it; all jerky rhythms and hall-of-mirrors guitars and, for the next hour, you’re under their spell.
Battles’ third and latest album, La Di Da Di, is vocal-free and the lack of a singer makes sense: they are a band who like to speak through their instruments. Williams and Konopka are sonic scientists – pressing a synth key here, bashing a guitar string there – whose experiments aim to bend their sound into weird and complex shapes.
The result is far from calculated, however. The songs feel alive and visceral, built up, then deconstructed, only to be built right back up again. And, for all the subtlety, it’s loud, too. Really loud.
Stanier’s pounding drumming is a guiding force through the wonky, ominous squelch of Summer Simmer, right through to the teasing, twisted swagger of The Yabba. And, it’s their “hit” Atlas (surelythe first ever song to start with a three minute cymbal solo) that sees the respectful head-nodding of the audience mutate into full-blown crowdsurfing.
When Battles first started, they were branded with the dubious term “math rock”. Yet for all their obvious complexities, what emerges tonight through their complications and convolutions is a love of sound. A joyful, ear-bleedingly loud sound.
