Artists: Battles
Venue: Studio B, Brooklyn, NY
Date: July 20, 2007
“We’re sorry, but the Battles show tonight that you bought tickets for has been moved from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. You may get a refund if you want.” No thanks, I’m a vampire in any case. Just make it worth my while, waiting for the trains, running on their severely reduced schedules at night. Getting to this nice part of Brooklyn with time to spare, I was surprised to find Studio B jumping with a deafening sound leaking from the heavily guarded (or “bouncerized”) doors every time some drunk hipsters left. Man, I was glad I’d remembered to bring earplugs. Having heard about this band’s legendary volume, I’d decided that having an additional layer of year of adequate hearing was probably well the worth the slightly reduced enjoyment of one of the premiere Math Rock bands of today.
After much confusion of which line to get in from, I finally made it in to see the previous band still rocking on stage. I use “rocking” in the loosest of senses here, because everyone in the audience was obviously bored out of their minds. When the boos started becoming louder than the music, the band wisely decided to pack it up. Unfortunately, the club DJ then took up the their mantle, playing shitty mainstream hip-hop. Had he never heard the Battles? Did he not realize the sets of people liking them and liking mainstream shit-hop probably had zero overlap? Could he not hear the yells of “you suck!” and “we want the battles!”? I might even have felt pity for him if he hadn’t been so annoyingly trying to engage the crowd, breaking the beat to yell out stupid catchphrases (”I can’t HEAR you!!” — “You fucking suck so shut the fuck up…can you HEAR that?”).
But like all periods of darkness, this too, passed, and the Battles took the stage. From the beginning, I could tell this was gonna be an intense show, as one of the band members set up some analog feedback loops with his guitar, to be joined only a minute and a half later by the drummer and the rest of the band. Totally devoted to their art, the band members were more like a machine — powerhousing through extended version of most songs from their phenomenal debut LP, with scarcely a concern for the audience. But unlike the cool indifference of Paul Banks that tends to lose audiences, this was the lack of attention caused by an extreme intensity and love for the music. The musicians were in their own world, but it was a world they created and projected so magnificently that the audience could also inhabit it. So while I didn’t particularly feel a direct connection with the band, I didn’t need to — we both had a direct connection the music, and so were indirectly together.
Within a few songs, the drummer’s shirt was sweat-soaked that he had to take it off to continue playing. Tyondai Braxton, who I’d seen before do some of his solo work (and been not particularly impressed by it), was in his element here, and I was shocked to find out that all the vocals on the album were not samples, but his voice run live through some filters. It was incredibly to see the layers being built live in front of me, much like Feist’s first performance in Seattle.
Some of the very best art is meant to communicate at a more primal level than intellect and verbal thoughts (that’s almost the raison d’ etre for non-verbal art forms), and so it comes as no surprise that I can’t remember many specific moments or things that I liked, but the feeling of incredible energy is what remains.
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