Battles & Clark - London Scala - 16/5/07
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
I'm glad Chris Clark (Clark, sorry - no 'Chris' any more. He's gone all serious) has a drummer with him tonight. As rewarding as his bafflingly dense and complex electronica is to listen to, without the live percussion it'd be very little by way of a visual experience. But here we get to see the interplay between Clark and his sticks man, the way they feed off each other by maintaining eye contact in the most vital sections, the way that Clark loves bobbing his whole body up and down to sounds that are being made by something other than his fingers flicking switches on machines. Y'know, actual wood, hitting something. Being able to see these rhythms really helps, as they're particularly difficult to figure our blindly - but that's part of what makes Clark worth listening to.
Sure, you can appreciate it as dance music, as a soundtrack to little more than a particularly indulgent session of getting out of your mind, but in moments of more clarity you can consider it as a proper work of art, dissect it, put it back together again in your own mind and have something that's entirely personal to you. Live, it's a bizarrely communal thing - people's bodies react on a base level, just grooving back and forth to the sounds, but the conversations their shifting torsos are indulging in are about things like polyrhythms and other geeky musical phenomena.
Battles provoke similar reactions, albeit far exaggerated ones, and deliver music that could similarly be thought of on very simple or advanced levels depending on ones mood (or, I guess, the mood of the band). The nice thing about this bunch in a live setting is how much more organic it feels, how it doesn't seem to matter whether you're musically literate enough to 'get it' or not, because the groove these math rockers dose out is just so unavoidably huge that you stop having conversations with your pals about what time signature they're playing in or what pedals they've got hooked up and just stand there and let it hit you. And hit hard it does.
John Stainer, right, he's a machine - nothing gets done in Battles if the wheels of his powerhouse one man rhythm section aren't in full working order. Which they always are. He's impeccable, one to add to the list of stunning yet underappreciated drummers that also counts Todd Trainer, Dale Crover and Chris Corsano (and few others) as members. He's that good. One of the most fun things about watching him is that cymbal he has ridiculously high up from the rest of his kit, which makes it seem that every rhythm he's playing has a narrative, like every drum pattern is a sentence that only really reaches its conclusion when he smacks the cymbal on high - like a kind of percussive exclamation mark.
'Atlas' feels like a proper pop song in these conditions. People sing along with its 'Whoa-AH-Oh!'s, even, which is something you never thought you'd see at a Battles gig. If this is math, it's stadium math. And that's a dawn which has taken far too long to come over the horizon.
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment