Judging by the number of ironically mustachioed people with folded arms, notepads and goofily oversized digital cameras, last week's show by experi-metal supergroup Battles at Great Scott will be well-chronicled by the hip, indie-scenester press.
Words like "dense," "cerebral" and other Allmusic.com adjectives will get liberally applied, and the band will rightly inch closer to being exalted as one of the decade's best live acts. So, I don't know what I can say about this show that hasn't been or won't soon be said by someone with more street cred than I have, and part of me wants to leave it to them.
But, I'm not going to. My inner loudmouth won't permit me to see something so dynamic, so different, and so utterly remarkable and not talk about it.
It's not literary duty that I'm responding to - I don't think I owe it to you or the band to document the show - it's a cry for help. Battles hurt me, pummeling my ears and eyes with a furious, technically astounding, trailblazer of a show, and mainly, I just want someone to ask me if I am OK.
Again, I am by no means breaking any new ground here, but I can't talk about Battles and not start with drummer John Stanier.
As a rule, pretty much every math rock band has a technically dazzling drummer because they need one: Keeping up with the unconventional, rapidly changing time signatures that define the genre is not easy, and it takes a special kind of percussionist to keep his or her band on cue. Were Stanier simply a good math rock drummer, I would humbly count him as an exceptional musician.
On the discordant "TRAS," he flawlessly shepherded his band through the bizarre 9/8 time signature, displaying how homeboy is more than worth his salt just as a math metal drummer. However, just as Battles is much more than a math metal band, Stanier's skills extend well beyond keeping unconventional time.
On the band's more experimental numbers, Stanier battered his tiny kit in ways that other drummers, math-leaning or not, don't even attempt, establishing himself as the scariest, least human and perhaps best drummer I have ever seen.
Usually, even if the genre's life-hating fans wanted to, math metal's atypical rhythms make it damn near impossible to dance and not have your head explode trying to count quarter notes. Graciously, Stanier infuses Battles' abstractions with intelligible, dance-worthy breaks that appease the raver in me as well as the angry, metal-loving cannibal. On "SZ2," from 2004's "B" EP, he channels drum 'n bass through a particle accelerator, occasionally reaching five feet in the air to hit his suspended crash-ride and inviting the crowd to dance while his thunderous bass drum (which he worried wasn't loud enough) beat them up and left them for dead.
After shielding his ears from the dissonant intro of "Hi/Lo," Stanier, who by this point had sweated through his entire T-shirt and pants and was almost sliding off his sweaty stool, took out his frustrations on his hi-hat, which he mercilessly punished through more than eight minutes of sharp quarter and whole notes.
People compliment drummers by saying that they are tight, that their rhythm forms a consistent, unwavering surface on top of which other instruments can sound good. On "Hi/Lo" and "Tanto," where his snare/hi-hat dueling slows down and speeds up with robotic precision, I'd describe Stanier's drumming as beyond tight.
Not only is his percussion unflappable enough for two of my uncoordinated friends and me to replace the rest of the band, learn their instruments, and sound decent, but he surpasses the normal drum-melody relationship by actually participating in the song rather than simply bounding it.
"Hi/Lo"'s jerky rhythms and spacey drumming are as much - in fact, probably more - a part of the song's overall aesthetic as the popping bass notes and keys.
I don't mean to marginalize his band mates; the other three members of Battles are by no means to be slept on. Ian Williams pulled double duty as keyboardist and guitarist, double-fisting the band's melodies while gyrating like his last name was Curtis. On "Atlas," the first single from the band's forthcoming debut full-length, he and fellow multi-instrumentalist Tyondai Braxton shaped Braxton's distorted vocal gibberish and their one-handed guitar strangling and keyboard groping into the kind of grinding, rust-on-rust noise that Big Black upset people with in the mid-1980s. It was harsh, violent and painful, and I loved every second of it (that's what she said, by the way).
Not many bands can violate their fans and have them write a 15-thumbs-up review of the show two days later, but when the violation is so sophisticated and creative, it's hard not to say good things about it.
Maybe the best part about Battles is that their music is so smart that most people - not me, not the mustachioed representatives from Team Indie's Department of Information - probably don't have a clue what is actually going on in these songs.
While it batters you into a state of jaw-dropping, ear-ringing fandom, it dares you to label or define it, defying expectation after expectation. There isn't a sufficient vocabulary to define what Battles does live, and I guess the best thing for a writer to do while waiting for one to emerge is keep trying.
Mikey Goralink is a sophomore majoring in American studies. He can be reached at Michael.Goralnik@tufts.edu.
