No band has marked indie's prog revival more definitively than Battles: Their debut, Mirrored, took rock for a set of puzzle pieces, but was ultimately defined by its pictorial sensibility-- each song felt like a cartoon soundtrack-- and the incorporation of jokes into the most historically humorless music in the known world.
Mirrored is also Battles' best record to date, and probably more enjoyable than almost any (mostly) instrumental rock record-- math-rock, nu-prog, all obscurely tagged and ultimately undefinable subgenres-- since Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die. But it also represented prog's worst tendencies: To be overwrought, grossly testosterone-fueled, and occasionally unaware of its own tedium. For as many who felt like Mirrored was their revelatory rock moment of the year, there were those who found it just plain alienating (oddly, they seem to be people with no objection to the winding ornaments of, say, Marnie Stern or Joanna Newsom). Compaion EP Tonto+ takes on its title track as well as another Mirrored song, "Leyendecker", plus a DVD which features videos for "Tonto" and "Atlas".
So, it's "Tonto", four times, over 34 minutes: The Mirrored version, a live version, and remixes by the Field and Four Tet. Pairing Battles with the Field, while a nice nod to indie cache in 2007, is a thick-headed musical conceit: Battles' music lies in the collision of details, and even though the Field quilted a record from millisecond snippets, he kept the source of each stitch largely anonymous. The result of this pairing seems uncomfortable, and further soured by the context of Battles' original. Four Tet fares better, strait-jacketing the beat into something more house-oriented, which-- when paired with the song's guitar melody, here taken up by a rumbling synthesizer-- helps realize the song's deeper, more sinister potential: country-disco. But then, with just three minutes to go, he lets the air out and turns to something we've all heard before, about 15 minutes ago: More of the original.
"Leyendecker" also appears twice-- once as a live version, once as a DJ EMZ remix featuring Joell Ortiz. The latter should be proof enough that Tyondai Braxton deserves some session work hammering out vocal hooks for commercial rap, but it also indicates that Battles aren't actually funky. At all. Then again, that's of little relevance, quality-wise-- part of Mirrored's greater gesture was a kind of stiffening, a movement toward the big and blocky, and that doesn't sit nicely within a hip-hop context.
As a consumer, it's hard to know what Battles want to do with Tonto+. The remixes are alright, and nearly all of the DVD, which features videos "Tonto" and "Atlas", can be seen online (even if the low-res compression of YouTube clips can't do them nearly the justice they deserve). Tonto+ doesn't really extend the life of the record-- what singles do anymore?-- but it's also worth noting that Mirrored, which only came out five months ago, isn't in need of an appendage.
