Consider the Battles almost accursed by intentional, circumstantial and even-- because of the encouragement of the first two-- subjective cross-referencing. Their 2001 debut Lycanthropy was way ahead of indie's lupine fetish, but Patrick Wolf went and knicked that name for his higher-profile 2003 launch. Of course, in 2004 an instrumental group emerged called just Battles, which these guys might have beaten to mild prominence if they'd released these recordings (many of which are rumored to be around five years old) sooner. The Battles' organ-heavy collisions of polish with zonk-out would have had us Pitchfolk describing them as "what would happen if the Shins were on Shimmy Disc" or "the New Zealand Pornographers."
Abuse your allusion: The cover art's gentle sci-fi kiddie-porn is a throwback to a dozen metal, psych, and classic-rock sleeves. The first song ("Changes") knowingly shares a title with classics by David Bowie, Black Sabbath, and Sugar. The second song ("Omega Man") knowingly shares a title with subclassics by the Bee Gees, the Police, and Fred Falke (while copping a Bowie lyric). And so forth. "Wonder…" employs overtly Beatles-esque keyboards, "Susan's Reply" uses elegant echoes to retap the early days of ambient music, inverting the contemporary played-to-programmed ratio, "(Make Love) in the Beds of Rivers" spends its second half cheekily hybridizing nods to "Feel Like Makin' Love" and "Wild Thing", and "We Were Right to Fight" is a titanically fetching shoegaze synthesis of beatkeeping by the Velvet Underground, the Feelies, and Galaxie 500.
And then you have all the groovy Vancouver interplay. In addition to undeniable vocal (and intelligence-level) similarities to A.C. Newman's current collective, members of the Battles are in various studio and live manifestations of Destroyer. And just as the New Pornographers adopt Destroyer songs ("Jackie Dressed in Cobras"), the Battles rejigger verses from "Streethawk II", one of the few oldies that Destroyer plays live. The resulting track, "Northern Man", stops just short of midwifing a beef between Bejar (who sings Battles backup vox) and the also-Canadian author of "Southern Man", Neil Young.
Not that the listener could anywhere on this album presume to know exactly what Stephen Wood is singing about. He dodges profundity on purpose, often offering a philosophical first clause only to follow it with an awkwardly obvious line. The Battles seem happily unpeggable, ranging from tight power-pop to spacey effects-pedal-exploitation, from winky mayhem to a dreamy (occasionally even lifeless) lilt. Imagine, at this point in the review, snoozy sentences pointing out Kinksisms, Floydisms, Pavement-y passages, Tommy James snippets, etc. Wood reminds me of a schizophrenic fellow that I had to eject from my bookstore job years ago for autographing all the books; he demanded that I acknowledge his role in the "continual chain of voices." The songs on Tomorrow's Eager Hands eventually speak to each other via playful sequencing. Wood acknowledges this puzzle-building tendency when he sings, "I have written this song before/ And it sounds a lot like this one."
