Spiritualized — Sweet Heart Sweet Light

There are two songs on Spiritualized‘s new album, Sweet Heart Sweet Light, which recall the fried, reach-for-the-sun-or-die-trying splendour of Jason Pierce’s one undisputed masterpiece, Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. “I Am What I Am” and “Mary” come as a consecutive pair, and they are glorious. Free-jazz skronking rockets through the former’s glammy stomp; on the latter, plaintive strings pierce through a stately pocket symphony.

More often, Sweet Heart… is a terrestrial affair, reining in the old mores and paranoia and sounding pretty joyful about having nothing much to celebrate. That’s not to say it isn’t a highly accomplished work from a true visionary; rather, it shows Jason Pierce has changed as a songwriter. Of course he still speaks the language of religion from the perspective of a non-believer—he’s not going to heaven unless God’s his chauffeur; Jesus is someone you pray to for salvation, redemption, forgiveness. Of course that makes him cling to clichés other artists would have outgrown long ago—”Love lights the flame when there’s hearts it can burn” and all that guff. And, of course, there remains a patina of druggy imagery in which he is sinner and saviour rolled into one.

“There is an elegant simplicity to parts of the album some listeners will mistake for tiredness”

But alongside all this, there is an elegant simplicity to parts of the album some listeners will mistake for tiredness, and that’s just not correct. You notice it most in the string arrangements, which I was pleasantly surprised to learn flow from Pierce’s pen. Familiar ingredients are gently transmuted into mystical, revelatory elements, as if he were an alchemist. On “Get What You Deserve”, a song whose bottom-end has been pretty much lobotomised (a carryover trait exhibited by all of the Spacemen 3), a faintly Eastern string motif weaves in and out of a misfiring organ drone, creating a sweetly woozy ambience. When John Harris interviewed Damon Albarn recently, the journalist picked up on the titling of “Caramel”, saying it was “seemingly referring to the brown goo produced when heroin is heated up”. On Sweet Light…’s more experimental cuts, there is a similarly opiate vibe.

Elsewhere, these strings are more innocent and playful, as on the soulful “Little Girl”, which could pass for a poppy Yo La Tengo number. “Life Is A Problem”, meanwhile, channels Ágætis byrjun-era Sigur Rós, in particular the palindromic arrangement of “Starálfur“. I smiled upon discovering that parts of this album were recorded at the Sundlaugin studio owned by that Icelandic post-rock outfit.

You might think, at this point, Sweet Light… is an album with an identity problem. It’s switching constantly between Pierce’s beloved 1960s pop, and the space rock he pioneered at the end of the 1980s. The lyrics betray his earlier taste for hedonism whilst also casting him as the family man (two of the songs feature the vocals of his eleven-year old daughter, Poppy).

“Pierce is visualising himself at death’s door, and he’s fine with it”

Well, no. This is a work that’s unafraid of swapping things around, but which essentially operates within one framework throughout: Pierce is visualising himself at death’s door, and he’s pretty much fine with it. The key lyric comes near the start of “Little Girl”: ”Sometimes I wish that I was dead,” he sings, “‘Cause only the living can feel the pain.” From that mental image he conjures forth different strands of his life to date: the “Play loud and drive fast” mantra in the liner notes, as in the jangly opening track, “Hey Jane”; the cocky charmer waltzing through “Too Late”; the dying man on an IV drip, petering out infinitesimally, on the gospel-tinged closer “So Long You Pretty Thing”. These are Pierce’s very own seven ages of man, and, he now admits, he revels in all of them.

There are moments of supreme tact and subtlety on this album he has never even thought to attempt previously: a velvety, parping tuba here; a very British take on motorik there. There are also moments where he totally lets go, and you cannot begin to think of this being music assembled painstakingly at home by a man whose liver had disintegrated (the thoroughly mental “Headin’ For The Top Now” is the best example of this). And so this isn’t anything like, in aggregate, that previous masterpiece, but it is an album true to the spirit of that same creator, fifteen years on. And that means it’s a unique set of flavours we should all taste, at least now and again.

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Spiritualized’s latest album, Sweet Heart Sweet Light, was released on 16th April 2012, on Double Six Records.

Fifty words for breathtaking

There’s a wonderful moment on “Lake Tahoe” (see above), from Kate Bush‘s 2011 album 50 Words For Snow, when she lifts her fingers from the piano for a moment, sighs exquisitely, then carries on with the plaintive chords that flesh out the song. Forget the tumbling, rumbling timpani, the fragments of lilting flute, the occasional orchestral draws—that’s the moment you realise this album was constructed in a real studio, in real time, with real and unmistakeable instruments.

Through the 1980s, Bush pioneered the use of the Fairlight CMI, an early digital sampling synthesizer which fleshed out the experimental compositions on albums like 1985′s Hounds Of Love. For some artists, the studio becomes their instrument; for Bush, it was the Fairlight. But at the same time, she never let go of her most powerful two tools: her piano, and her voice. Those were the tools that underpinned “The Ninth Wave”, the powerful and career-defining suite that forms the second side of Hounds Of Love.

On her ‘comeback’ album, Aerial, released in 2005 after a twelve-year hiatus, Bush hid her piano pretty well, even as she penned songs that were alternately wittier or more mature than before. That might have been the album’s undoing: the music behind these lengthy ruminations was sophisticated, but drifted towards the forgettable. Tastefully dry crunches of electric guitar; smoothed-out drums; a pace that never rises beyond the incidental. The industry forgave her; she had evolved into a sacred cow.

If Aerial stripped back the artifice of her supposed mythology to reveal the joy she took from mundanity (raising her son Bertie, doing the laundry, worshipping Elvis in the supermarket aisle), then 50 Words For Snow is the album which strips back musically. Never has Bush sounded so naked. That’s not to say the music isn’t complex, however. The way the piano weaves and wends its way around the two voices—those of Kate and Bertie)—in the opener “Snowflake” is rich in subtext. Between the cracks seep organic wafts of electronic resonance; the elder Bush sets the scene; the younger takes on the role of the titular snowflake, on its patient and meandering descent to earth. The next two tracks complete a trio of piano-led numbers thirty-five minutes in length; at its pinnacle is “Misty”, an adult-oriented retelling of Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman. The narrator falls for a snowman; she invites him back in; he melts at her touch. The morning after, soaking sheets are the only trace of their tryst. It’s a haunting tale, and it’s told in such a way that any obvious innuendo is avoided.

Hounds Of Love had a second side consisting of a piano-centred suite; 50 Words For Snow front-loads its wintry equivalent. Its back half is musically more varied: “Wild Man” takes an Irish folk jig on an expedition in the Himalayas, on the hunt for the Yeti, while “Snowed In At Wheeler Street”, a duet with Elton John (!), unfolds over eerily filtered synthesizer pulses. The title track, meanwhile, is lyrically witty but sonically evokes the 1990s paranoia of Massive Attack, with brushed drumming and penetrating, lurking bass-work. The closer, “Among Angels”, is a barely-there performance for piano and ethereal strings. As the song peters out delicately, Bush sings, “There’s someone who’s loved you forever but you don’t know it / You might feel it and just now show it”, beautifully summarising the translucent, watchful and protecting gaze heavenly bodies seem to hold over this album.

It would be tempting to think of 50 Words For Snow as a seasonal gimmick—she has form, after all, having released a Christmas single in 1980, “December Will Be Magic Again“—but to do so having actually listened to this work would be criminal. The timing might have been fitting, but the songs themselves, and the way they fit together into an uneasy, creeping mood, is timeless. If this is the start of an Indian summer for Bush, I don’t care that it started in the depths of winter.

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50 Words For Snow by Kate Bush was released in November 2011, on Fish People.

M83 and his Wall of sound

The more time I spend with M83′s recent double-album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, the more I understand its place in the history of progressive music. By eschewing the shoegaze structures that characterised their breakthrough album, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, the band has managed to weld together the perfect kind of lengthy, wandering album. There were hints of the pop ethic on their previous full-length, Saturdays = Youth, but this time round the choruses are bigger, the vocals clearer, and the studious techno marathons reduced to interstitial passages.

If you’re looking for the album’s clear antecedent, it’s got to be Pink Floyd’s The Wall, released in 1979, which was a sprawling opus of tangled emotions and paranoia, but also, crucially, had a fair few easily-strummable hits that were then dressed up in ceremonially progressive garb. Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is an awful lot more triumphant than The Wall, and it’s not convoluted by even the sketchiest of narrative conceits. All the same, the parallels are plain to see.

Chord changer, life changer

It’s the rule that 80 per cent of what’s written about James Mercer’s The Shins should refer to Natalie Portman’s gushing endorsement in Garden State.

“You gotta hear this one song — it’ll change your life; I swear”,

is what she said in the 2004 film, referring to “New Slang”. But I don’t think The Shins changed too many people’s lives, mainly because Mercer’s creativity seemed to have dried up soon after the release of 2007′s Wincing The Night Away. That album was clearly the work of an auteur and his sometime bandmates—emotionally disenchanted, studio-laden, heavy with storytelling—and the story behind this new comeback album, Port Of Morrow, does little to dispel the prevailing attitude. Very publicly, this time, Mercer shoved away his old band, bringing to bear the idea that they were only ever bit-part players. Very privately, he holed himself up in studios with Greg Kurstin, an old hand who has worked with an array of chart-friendly pop singers, to create a subtle and elegantly understated gem of a record.

Field Music — Plumb

Nothing divides opinion like prog. Some lap it up; others despise it; few just “tolerate” it. Field Music, which is a distinctly average name for the partnership of David and Peter Brewis, are often mistaken for prog, but this doesn’t quite hit the mark: prog is dogged, and riffs on the same theme for an extended period of time before veering into a new and sometimes unexciting direction. Field Music may explore a diverse range of instruments and textures and genres in their work but, by contrast, they are restless, skitting from sound to sound like schoolboys let loose in a sweetshop.

The Brewis brothers, who are Sunderland natives and wear their small-town heritage proudly on their sleeves, last released an LP in 2010: Field Music (Measure) was an expansive double album with a second half heavy on bucolic ambience which was sui generis compared with their previous work. The first half was at once more familiar, but also steeped in the shock of the new—more swagger in the guitars on “Each Time Is A New Time”, more seduction in the Princely funk of “Let’s Write A Book”. It was weird, didn’t really work in a live setting, and I loved it.

Seventy minutes versus thirty-five. That’s the first thing that hits you when you look at …Measure’s follow-up, the obtusely titled Plumb. This new release is half the size but bristles with energy, engaging with snippets of moods and scenes across its fifteen songs, which run the gamut between forty-second interludes to three-minute pocket epics. Field Music refuse to settle, as evidenced by their inter-album transformations, and also by the intra-album prevarication which typifies Plumb.

“I want a different idea of what / Better can be that / Doesn’t necessitate having more useless / Shit.”

Lyrically, they’re certainly on more well-worn terrain, exploring the minutiæ of drizzly, transport-laden, indecisive England. There are lyrical sighs on this album which could power entire episodes of Countdown, Antiques Roadshow or Look East. Love is always unrequited, and any anger (“My generation are opting out of choosing sides”, from “Choosing Sides”, is at once fed-up and wistful) quickly dissipates into a wave of deference.

But one mistakes this cosiness for inertia at one’s peril: thematically, there is definite progression from previous Field Music releases. For example, the questioning song-titles (“Who’ll Pay The Bills?”, “Is This The Picture?”, “How Many More Times?”) speak of generational dissatisfaction and a sadness at the age of austerity. It’s not a universal proclamation that “Modern life is rubbish”—in fact, the brothers’ view of society is far more nuanced, and tinged with pleasant anecdotes.

The social commentary may put Plumb in the realm of Gang of Four and XTC, but the scope of styles, tempos, time signatures and textures skated over evades comparison. Compositionally, the album is frequently dazzling and broad. To consider just one exotic pairing, the rousing and punkish final track, “(I Keep Thinking Abou) A New Thing” is preceded by three minutes of bruised krautrock, “Just Like Everyone Else”. Elsewhere, we find homemade found sounds competing against crisp and intricate beats (as in “A New Town”—see top of article) and, in general, there is a great deal more variety than the electric piano fallback of old. The sweetshop analogy rings true, with assiduous selections of stringed instruments, obscure keyboards, and the occasional mournful tuba.

There are also moments of supreme tenderness—as in “A Prelude to Pilgrim Street”, which could have soundtracked one of those awkward scenes in Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and the stately”So Long Then”—which is not an emotion associated with either post-punk or prog. But tenderness does lie at the heart of what Field Music are really about: sweet pop music, refracted into a thousand disparate pieces.

Duffers are harder to ignore in a thirty-five minute song-cycle, compared with the odyssey that was Field Music (Measure): “From Hide And Seek to Heartache” quickly wears on the listener, for one. But this remains an album of understated brilliance; seldom showy, there is always a treat of a three-part vocal harmony or an elegant string arrangement just around the corner. It might be an album that you initially admire, and eventually love. How long that journey takes is probably an English settlement.

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Related articles

• Choosing which side of the plumb-line (misplacedswag.wordpress.com)
• Becker’s band of Brewis brothers (misplacedswag.wordpress.com)
• ‘We earn five grand a year’ (guardian.co.uk)

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Plumb by Field Music was released on 13th February 2012 by Memphis Industries.

2011, I’m a Tumblr

I don’t feel able to construct a properly ranked list of my favourite albums of 2011—principally because I didn’t listen to enough albums of 2011. Instead, I am posting morsels of goodness on a Tumblr, which you can find here.

Fizbeast of a tune

You know how it is: you’re scouring through old records and you chance upon a 1980 album put out by a traditional Yugoslavian group called Ansambl Bakije Bakića; you sample one of their songs for your 37-minute minimalist techno workout; next thing you know, their cheerful brass fanfare is blasting out of the PA in every happening club.

Well, if you’re a pioneer like Ricardo Villalobos, it’ll be a familiar story, and you’ll probably have dined out on it numerous times.

I’m not enough of a 3AM hedonist to picture myself dancing to “Fizheuer Zieheuer“, or even its sparser cousin “Fizbeast”, but I think I’m just about cerebral enough to enjoy it as a piece of music. From maybe three elements, Villalobos sculpts an subtly shifting work: the primary snippet of brass; a solitary horn figure; an endlessly tinkered-with boom-tick beat. The piece is endlessly joyful—a victory march totally untinged with the familiar regrets of war.

Look at that artwork: an unrelentingly graphic cutaway of the human head, displaying every layer of inner working. Tissue and muscle, nerve, vessel and bone—these are the anatomical equivalents of the fragments that combine to form the piece. Alone, insignificant; together, unimpeachable. You can swear at Villalobos for being frustrating or oblique—a track this long and static takes serious balls, after all—but you can’t argue about whether it achieves the end goal. As Four Tet names a track on his Everything Ecstatic album a year earlier, it puts a “Smile Around the Face”.

Villalobos exposes the method to his madness, and all it turns out to be is some sneaky filtering and delay which, when applied to these everyday ingredients, gives rise to an amorphous creation. Yes, the choice of sample is astute— you should listen to the source material, “Pobjednički Čoček”, in its complete state, to see how craftily he repurposes such a fleeting moment of joy—but this is no tapestry of disparate elements. Instead, it is a twenty-first century refashioning of the beating retreat: something straightforward and accessible from which we can all derive some pleasure.

Five weeks; an eternity

I spent most of the summer travelling through three proximate but culturally distinct Central American countries—Mexico (specifically the Yucatán Peninsula), Cuba, and Belize. Not a typical trio to cover in one trip, but like I said, they were next to each other on a map, and like I didn’t say, I wanted to put as much distance between myself and university as possible. So that happened.

Even though the summer is traditionally a Siberian outpost as far as new music is concerned, I got back and felt like I must, surely, have missed out something big. Amy Winehouse had died while I was in Cuba, but that didn’t really count. I wanted there to have been a massive album release or new discovery that I would be forced to retrospectively acclimatise myself to; instead, there was the silly-season mush, with a few glimpses of quality piercing through a fog of festivals. The internet, it seemed, hadn’t taken kindly to my disappearance off the face of the earth (a sample comment posted on my Facebook wall read: “if you could find yourself it would be a great help, we’ve been looking everywhere, under tables, in little bins, nooks and crannies, inside the LSE penguin, google earth, but you are so little you’re not really there”), and had retaliated by sinking into indifference.

I came back and the most significant thing I could think to do, against the backdrop of starting a new job, was tackling another Steely Dan album. (For those who don’t know, several years ago, on a post-Field Music high, I bought the entire Steely Dan discography on iTunes for £7.99. An education.) Previously, I immersed myself in Aja and The Royal Scam. The former was known to be a career highlight, but also the perfect manifestation of the difficult duo at their most arch and pretentious; I loved it. The latter was the album which preceded it, and was less effusively praised; I loved it.

Now, I took on Pretzel Logic—the last album they made as a normal band i.e. the people writing the music also played the music, and then went and toured in support of the music. It’s also the album that is given the most unqualified plaudits, perhaps because the songs on it are economical, relatively conventional in structure, and less inward-looking than the jazzier compositions on Aja. Now that I have heard thoroughly three of Steely Dan’s albums, I can begin to spot their favourite chord progressions as they unravel; the same goes for their preferred guitar tones, and also the stacked harmonies they put to good use in choruses. Listening to three of their albums in reverse chronological order, as I have done (though Katy Lied, which fits in between Pretzel Logic and The Royal Scam, is still to be broken in), is an interested exercise in that it has allowed me to observe their musical hallmarks in a kind of reverse-evolution.

Whereas certain structures in the human body (e.g. the eye) seem irreducibly complex, the aforementioned Steely Dan hallmarks become, if anything, more appealing the simpler they get. So now, having appreciated the band at the apex of their existence as a ‘rock’ band (a misnomer, but it’ll do), I can see why their later albums are less universally admired. Pretzel Logic is a very fine album, with tasteful musicianship but also a more explicit sense of the fun that sometimes got lost in black humour and tricksy rhythms on the other two albums. The songs zip along tidily, and when they are at their most canonical, e.g. the folky “With A Gun”, it is easy to ascribe to the view that so much recent music is essentially derivative—and only occasionally does justice to the source material (see LCD Soundsystem, Spoon, Girls).

I shall finish by quoting one of my own tweets: this may be a bad move, but it neatly presages the next few months of this blog.

Tweeps: tomorrow I start in full-time employment, which means, given my previous form, expect a buzz of activity on misplacedswag.wordpress.com.—
Sachin Patel (@misplacedswag) September 04, 2011

See you next time.

Bon Iver — Bon Iver

Sufjan Stevens said he was going to write an album about every state in America, but gave up on the job after just two. Justin Vernon started off with just his broken heart, in the Wisconsin hunting cabin his father built. Four years later, he’s ventured as far as ten geographical and temporal fragments, each captured in songs recorded in a converted veterinarian clinic.

It sounds like even hanging out with Kanye West in Hawaii couldn’t restore his self-confidence. “And at once I knew I was not magnificent,” he proclaims over a peculiarly sketchy arrangement in “Holocene”. Throughout the album, ragged hollowbody guitars sketch faint semblances of chords; clattering percussion drifts in and out of the mix, adding colour and, occasionally, rhythm. For Emma, Forever Ago may have been minimalist in its instrumentation, but it was also tethered to the ground in its strumming regularity. By contrast, Bon Iver floats between disparate genres and proportions in the space of a three- or four-minute anti-pop songs. In the case of “Holocene”, an elegant cascade of acoustic guitar, backed by a lonesome brass drone, suddenly cedes to faint entrails of saxophone, which are in turn interrupted by, and forced to rise to the challenge of, a brief crescendo of drums, which weaves between the two channels.

Some songs are named after recognisable places, only muddied up, as if they’ve been expelled from a dying typewriter. No such sense of accident in the lyrics, which are lexically sound but defy easy parsing, so oblique and antiquated are some of the words Vernon chooses. In “Michicant”, he gives us “melic in the naked”: the kind of lyric that invites the listener to reach for the dictionary. In another era, we used to laugh at Cedric Bixler-Zavala of The Mars Volta, for spitting out a thesaurus every time he reached for the microphone; Vernon is more caring and considerate of his vocabulary. The song in question proceeds in stately fashion, with a cabasa infrequently breaking through mellifluously  strummed guitar and serene meanderings on woodwind and brass. Bon Iver is less the work of one man, or indeed a band, and more the collective endeavour of lauded session musicians, and an ethereal gloved hand which sprinkles magic production dust to make reasonably challenging music coalesce, in spite of a dearth of dynamic progression.

A track later, he re-imagines the Biblical figure Hinnom, whose son begat a valley named Gehenna, as a place in modern-day Texas. “Hinnom, TX” splurges out of its fictional geography with filtered piano reminiscent in texture and construction of the arrangement in the Spoon song, “The Ghost of You Lingers“. In the middle of the mix, and in an oddly low register, Vernon booms rather than sings, competing with occasional pulses of sub-bass tones. Atop this lyrical poetry, a multi-tracked falsetto choir of Vernon’s invention packs in opposing non sequiturs. And then, in typically obtuse fashion, the song ebbs away into white space.

More than anything, you can hear the afterglow of Unmap, the album Vernon performed on as part of Volcano Choir. With their abstract soundscapes punctuated by an otherworldly mass of stacked vocals, sometimes warped in extremis by studio fiddling, both albums suggest a leakage of digital signals into the pastoral world. On “Calgary“, which was previewed a few months ago, Bon Iver beam in a wedding hymn from the end of the universe, with synthesised approximations of church organs undercut by spacey drumming, which then give way to widescreen guitars. This kind of fleeting, gentle experimentation recalls Talk Talk circa Spirit of Eden, and does, I suppose, suggest a greater assuredness on the part of the songs’ creator. Even if, lyrically, Vernon is still battling demons of the past in his own inscrutable way, the fluid, shifting quality of the music is that of a more confident songwriter, stretching out from the limited palette he previously exploited.

It is another of Vernon’s side projects which informs the album’s strangest, most jarring song. The closer, “Beth/Rest”, was described by its writer as “the part where you pick up your joint and re-light it”, which offers an intriguing proposition as to how he likes to listen to Magic FM. Somehow, he invokes the worst excesses of 1980s soft rock—onanistic guitar solo, gated drums, New Age piano preset—and gets away with it. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to enjoy it as a guilty pleasure, or hate it so much that I would want to re-listen to the nine tracks which precede it. You have to make a pretty special album to earn the right to that kind of self-indulgence—or it could be the case that, to Vernon, as he suggests in interviews, there is nothing embarrassing about the kind of music “Beth/Rest” dredges up. That would certainly explain his unabashed involvement with Gayngs, a soft rock outfit whose MO was to write every song in the spirit of 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love“.

It is in no way surprising that the follow-up to For Emma, Forever Ago is so different. That album was a product of circumstance, which obscured the diverse influences its creator would later cherry-pick on his ancillary excursions—Gayngs, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Volcano Choir. This time round, he’s given a truer account of his self, which, to me, seems more conflicted than ever. The one constant is his vocals, which are a revelation. We knew he had quite a set of pipes, of course, but the vocal arrangements on Bon Iver are sublime, and break away from our traditional expectations of harmony. The closest equivalent, I suppose, is James Blake, who takes a more digital approach to achieve the same ends; both artists turn their slightly granular tones to their advantage, at times sounding like harmoniums rather than humans. Vernon is more sparing with his use of technology, but when he does reach for the computer, it’s devastating. If you were floored by “Woods“, you’ll practically melt at some of the more outré moments on Bon Iver.

All this verbiage, and yet I still confess to be not wholly convinced by this album. Perhaps it is the distance Bon Iver create between creator and audience: there is certainly less on display here for the listener to be hooked in by. So translucent are the washes of colour on this album, that they are overpowered by the strength of  the watercolour-and-collage artwork. When I scour my library for a superior attempt at reining in such a rich tapestry of sonics and genres, I alight upon Flying Lotus’s Cosmogramma, which sounds bombastic but not arrogant. A very different set of influences pervade Bon Iver, to be sure, but it presents the same challenge to the sculptor and, in this instance, on too many occasions, something doesn’t connect, or the song will simply peter out into the ether.

A hard album to fall in love with, then.

Battles — Gloss Drop

If you watched Adam Curtis‘s excellent three-part documentary, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace“, you might know something about Richard Brautigan‘s idyllic dreamland of man and machine interfacing towards a common goal. When Tyondai Braxton, Ian Williams, John Stanier and Dave Konopka released their first LP under the moniker Battles, Pitchfork’s Jess Harvell foresaw a similar synergistic future. The language in her review of Mirrored was at once brutal and admiring: she wrote of “pitiless CPUs” and “hammer connect[ing] with skin”, but concluded that the band had “done more to extend the idea of a flesh-and-blood band enhanced by computer technology than anyone since the late, lamented Disco Inferno”.

Now the “bionic rockers” are back, but they’re a man down. Braxton left to concentrate on his solo work (he’s a budding composer in the classical tradition); the other three deleted his parts from the computer; then they rebooted the whole project; then they wrapped up the whole thing by inviting four guest singers from the outer reaches of music onto the mic. It’s quite a way to deal with a break-up—but Gloss Drop definitely doesn’t sound like a break-up album.

So what does Gloss Drop sound like? Outrageously technical music that’s great fun, mostly. The playfulness is writ large this time, so there are cartwheeling circus organs and smatterings of steel drums—or, at least, things that sound steel drums, but may in fact be processed samphire for all I know. It starts out majestically with “Africastle”, about which I enthused at an earlier date, and then wrong-foots us with the deranged pop of “Ice Cream”, a sunny and casual song to which people will swim, sunbathe and, yes, eat ice cream. The remainder of the album’s first half is more sludgy and dense, consisting in the haunted organ-drones of “Futura”, the tangled fireworks of “Wall Street”, and the industrial carnage of “My Machines”, which features a guest turn on the microphone from a whiny Gary Numan.

Then, things get more Caribbean. “Dominican Fade” lives up to its namesake: a brief, palette-cleansing interlude, it bounces steel drums around a loose calypso. “Toddler” is a more inscrutable diversion, shorn of the usual thumping drums of Stanier, who continues to be the backbone of the band at all other times. Completing the trio of contracted instrumentals is the intriguingly titled “Rolls Bayce”, which sounds like a fleeting drive through a nascent carnival. There’s a dancehall feel to the rolling rhythm, over which are interlaid a jumble of those pesky steel drums (they get everywhere!).

Finally, to close out the album, there are two more epic compositions, the latter of which is augmented by a further guest vocalist. “White Electric” begins in tastefully restrained style, but eventually explodes into Morricone-sized proportions, with chase-scene guitars rumbling through the mix. “Sundome”, featuring avantgarde babbling from Yamantaka Eye of Boredoms, is tropical and triumphant. More steel drums, surprise surprise, and again, we’re not sure if they’re emanating from a guitar or a cheese-grater or the big toe of Al Doyle. The first half of the song is more freeform, but it eventually morphs into a stricter affair which struts around a surprisingly simplistic rhythm, not so much hammered out as telegraphed by Stanier. Eye’s vocals re-enter, multi-tracked to sound like disc scratching, and then the whole thing peters out tantalisingly, riding high on good vibrations.

It is arguably pointless to make detailed comparisons between Gloss Drop and its predecessor, Mirrored: the earlier album arrived context-free, for me at least (Helmet? Don Caballero? These names meant nothing to me in 2007), and sounded like it had been beamed in from an alien planet. I will say this though: Mirrored also sounded context-free, in part because of Braxton’s mutated funhouse vocals, which resisted any form of interpretation from the listener. As with what I wrote about Explosions in the Sky, this was music onto which you could graft any emotion or mood you desired. “Tonto” might have evoked memories of long-distance flight for some, and  sensations of extreme paranoia for others—but you can’t say the same thing for this set of songs. They seem rooted in more definite locations; less otherworldly, more terrestrial. “Sweetie & Shag”, for example, a really very lovely slice of fudge featuring vocals from Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino, is clearly assembled by an Earthling band, as opposed to the conscious supercomputer that you theorised could have been behind stuff like “Tij” and the enigmatic “B + T”.

All of this makes Gloss Drop less of an odyssey than what we’ve come to expect from Battles in all its incarnations. Mirrored once soundtracked a bus journey I took from London to Oxford, and it transformed the prosaic motorway idling into a warp-speed interstellar roller-coaster ride. Gloss Drop never reaches a peak, consisting as it does in two quite discrete halves, both of which could have made the basis of satisfying EPs from two different bands. There are catchy bits, there are heads-down fretboard fireworks, there are passages you could dance to, or which might form the building blocks of a serviceable chart hit. But there’s no complete immersion going on: the band no longer sound special, and that’s a shame.

Pick ‘n’ mix: “Africastle”, ”Wall Street”, “White Electric”.

Related articles

• Battles, methodically plodding along (misplacedswag.wordpress.com)
• Battles – Gloss Drop Premature Evaluation (stereogum.com)
• Ice Cream by Battles proves avant garde music can be fun: but who do they rate? (guardian.co.uk)