Brooklyn Rockers Battles Appeal to More Than Just The Boys’ Club

At a midsized New York concert venue, genre-hopping quirk-rock quartet Battles are slowly alienating a small portion of their hometown audience. Each member tends to stay in his quarter of the stage, concentrating deeply to hit his marks. As the crowd—full of beards, bald spots and puffed chests—purchases beers and shots for one another, some members of the band’s already minuscule female constituency tap their boyfriends on their shoulders and say, “I don’t think I get this. I want to leave”; the skittish, childish vocals and barrage of guitar heroics does not relent. Battles have faced this problem since their inception, and, despite the mostly masculine audience at this particular concert, the tides are gradually turning as they tour. So, gender stereotypes aside, why should Battles appeal to only certain people?

Given each band member’s slightly arcane musical origin, it’s their “opposites attract” dynamics that would possibly make them attractive in the first place. The wild-haired and musically unpredictable vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist Tyondai Braxton is the son of avant-garde composer/musician Anthony Braxton. Square-jawed indie rocker Ian Williams once played guitar with firebrand Pittsburgh math-rockers Don Caballero. Guitarist/bassist Dave Konopka served time in Caballero peers Lynx, and drummer John Stainer started out in proto-alt rockers Helmet, currently spending his meantime with Mike Patton’s hard rock outfit Tomahawk. While the foursome has released a trio of critically lauded EPs, they’ve finally achieved their vision on their debut full-length, Mirrored (Warp). With more vocals, a wider spectrum of musical styles (jazz, rock, skzzz) and what Braxton describes as a more “neutral” sound, it might seem the group is poised for a breakthrough. All things considered, however, Battles seem ambivalent to how their growth is perceived.

“We were doing interviews a couple weeks ago in Germany, and a radio DJ or something said, ‘My feeling about your album is that you’re trying to get more girls to come to your shows,’” says Williams at a pit stop en route to Montreal the day after the New York show. “The suggestion is that we’re somehow prettying up the music or making it more palatable, which is kind of a double-edged compliment-insult… It would be great if everybody was engaged in the music, but it’s not like we’re trying to become a boy band.”

“I feel like this music doesn’t tell you how to feel,” Braxton proposes. “To individual people, it means different things. I think the sound of the band isn’t telling you what you should feel. So, in that, it’s neutral… The same [vocal] line that one person thinks might sound scary might sound really happy or hilarious to someone else.”

“I would take it as a compliment: The more girls that came, the better,” adds Williams. “It’s sort of just a healthier social environment than 400 dudes packed into a sweaty building. You know, it makes it more fun for everybody. I think you’re reaching more people when your genders are balanced.”

When writing Mirrored, each member of the band found their balance as they gained a better sense of who they were after a couple years of touring, learning how they fit into Battles better than while writing the EPs, which led to a more confident-sounding album. Contrary to popular belief, improvisation isn’t a major factor in what seems like the group’s monster jams, but more of a jumping off point for the numerous pieces that comprise a song.

Moreover, the quartet took a compositional approach when writing. They placed large sheets of easel-sized art paper on the wall and jotted down the silly names they gave each musical bit. For Mirrored’s “Tonto,” Braxton’s introductory keyboard/guitar melody was dubbed “Angelica Huston,” which lasts until Williams comes in with his own “Br’er Rabbit” (there’s no explanation for why these parts got their names). With close to 20 individual parts to each song, they would rearrange the order of the sub-parts on their art paper. “We’re not talking about eight bars of 4/4 time,” says Williams, referring to the most elementary tenet of musical composition. “We don’t think in blocks like that.”

Since each song is dependent on various electronic loops and echoes, they become more complicated to play live as the group adds a new part. On their current tour, Battles are only playing “Atlas,” “Tonto,” “TIJ” and “Race: In” from their new album, due to how green they are to the songs, each one spanning a far wider number of subgenres than most people have heard of. (Maybe it’s the boys’ club mentality that comes with the music that limits their audience.) Discussing how people try to pick one genre to describe the band, Braxton says, “It’s kind of like ordering a hamburger with everything on it and saying, ‘Hey, did you eat that bread?’ [It’s] kind of cheapening it.” The amount of concentration it takes to keep a song going in a live setting accounts for why the group seems so stoic onstage, but at the same time it might also be the reason for their limited appeal.

All that is changing with Mirrored, though, and it seems everyone who hears the album has a different interpretation. Like their militaristic name’s many meanings, it all comes down to how you look at it and that’s what people of all genders are starting to realize. “It’s not as simple as, ‘We’re called Battles and we play metal,’” notes Williams. “[Our name] has different meanings within hip-hop and it has certain rock suggestions or it sort of suggests that people are either battling musically… I sort of like it because it is specific in so many different ways but it’s also generic, sort of a dumb rock band name at the same time. I like that it’s not Puke Burger or anything, it’s just sort of like a band name.”

And the paradox continues.

Technorati Tags:  Battles   Mirrored   Warp Records   Brooklyn Bands   Tyondai Braxton

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