“There is no ‘Warp sound’”,
says Steve Beckett in Rob Young’s new book on
the legendary Sheffield label. “It’s just
like pointing to a rainbow and saying, ‘Hey,
you’ve got too much red, not enough brown, and
you curve too much.’ The rainbow just turns
around and says, ‘What do you mean? I’m
a rainbow – I’m supposed to be like this.’
We are supposed to be just the way we are.”
While this may be a difficult concept for many fans
of a certain age to swallow, Warp’s latest release
- from New York underground scenesters Battles - proves
that the label’s musical landscape has very
definitely shifted from what many would consider to
be the original ‘Warp sound’.
Comprising an all-star cast of alternative superstars,
Battles is a collaborative effort. Ian Williams (guitar
and keyboards), John Stanier (drums) and Dave Konopka,
(guitar and bass) cut their teeth in cult industrial
metal /thrash-core bands while Tyondai Braxton (voice/
keyboards/ guitar/ electronics) is a notorious avant-jazz
solo musician and Prefuse
73 collaborator. Interestingly it is this link
with the Warp hip-hop star that helped draw awareness
to the group. Battles are Prefuse
73's favourite band, so much so that he paid for
them to go on tour with him in order to educate the
hip-hop masses – “so the kids who didn't
get guitars might see things from a different perspective”.
Impressive CVs, but what do they sound like together?
This introductory album pack is made up of three previously
released but super-rare EPs - Tras and EP
C, both released in June of 2004 on Cold Sweat
and Monitor respectively, and the B EP released
on Dim Mak in September 2004.
Each track is a self-contained experimental jam, packed
full by musicians battling to take their individual
and collective sound to another level. The resultant
brew – perhaps inescapably - betrays echoes
of such post-rock forefathers as Tortoise and Slint
in the edgy guitar playing and the raw experimentalism
which owes as much to the free jazz tradition as it
does to the alternative rock scene. There is so much
going on here that it is difficult to avoid clutching
at possible sonic juxtapositions which may help to
describe the music – Can meets The Soft Machine,
Captain Beefheart meets Steve Reich… Blurring
of boundaries is a much overused phrase these days
but this is exactly what Battles are up to.
Album opener B+T betrays Battles heavily
beat orientated sound, mixed with an electronic minimalism
that owes a lot to Steve Reich. Elsewhere, UW
and BTTLS, stripped of the crashing drums,
wander off into all encompassing electronic reveries
– like Can during their most distracted and
introspective moments. On Fantasy, one of
the record’s stand-out tracks, a hypnotic and
brooding mix of electronics and warped polyrythms
hammers and hisses like an anthropomorphic machine
room. Dance meanwhile is at times so frenetic
as to be reminiscent of the John Zorn of Naked City
and the like.
Post rock has never been a satisfactory label –
neither has the subsequent math rock variant. Battles
describe their sound as ‘somewhere between electronic
and rock’, not so much ‘math rock dudes’
as ‘some other shit dudes’. It is worth
remembering that Warp are no strangers to this world.
Tortoise released Standards on the label
in 2001 and a younger generation of rockers like Maximo
Park and !!! seem to be leading the label’s
attack into 2006. Whatever Battles is, this is deeply
challenging music, and after all, isn’t that
what Warp is supposed to be about?
Stuart Aitken
3/5
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