Let's get one thing out of the way: Gloss Drop shouldn't really be compared to its predecessor, Mirrored. The sole Battles record to feature Tyondai Braxton's digitally cartoonified vocals, Mirrored is now consigned to brilliant one-off status in the Battles catalog; Gloss Drop, created after Braxton left the group entirely, is more of a refinement and expansion of Battles' early work. In a way, for fans, the loss of Braxton was the best thing that could have happened to Battles. It meant they couldn't record a true follow up, which might then pale (or just come off as more of the same) next to one of the most distinctive and unexpected debut LPs of the 21st century. Battles could have recorded an all-instrumental album in the Mirrored mold, or they could have drafted in another singer to try and imitate Braxton's crucial contribution. Instead, they forced themselves, having lost their most immediately striking and divisive element, to move in a new and potentially radical direction. So the important questions with Gloss Drop become, "Is this new direction interesting?" and "Have Battles made it thrilling?"
The answers are: "Yes," and "More often than you might guess." Mirrored was an album that made its impact via complexity and speed and wild humor, a sound that owed as much to the orchestral zaniness of classic cartoon soundtracks as the grimmer heads-down virtuosity of the metal and math-rock bands in which the Battles members made their names. Not only could these guys pull off these wild instrumental zigzags at high velocity, they made ultra-tricky, computer-assisted pop-prog sound like fun. For their circumstances-dictated new direction, Battles have slowed their roll a bit, foregrounding both the pop and propulsive qualities of the music rather than its can-we-top-ourselves inventiveness. It still sounds like devious fun, but the sort you get from a band tweaking audience expectations.
Gloss Drop is the most ride-the-groove record Battles have ever made, owing plenty to both the straight-forwardness of house and rock and the crazed syncopations of soca and dancehall, where Mirrored's whole point could seem like leaving listeners breathless with this-could-go-anywhere prog invention. And considering Battles are possibly the tightest man-machine unit going now that LCD Soundsystem are dead, you can imagine how hot these grooves burn, and how meticulously they're constructed, their most audacious attempt yet to make the line between "programmed" and "played" completely invisible.
Of course I say these two albums shouldn't be compared, but that won't stop most people from doing just that. Inevitably the starker differences between the two will leap right out on first listen, but if you're worried about a complete makeover, Gloss Drop still does sound an awful lot like Battles. There's the same blurring until you can't be sure what instrument is responsible for which melodic or rhythmic element of the mix: Are those steel drums all over this record, or a guitar processed to sound that way, or some sort of "Caribbean" software patch? There are still the same surging moments when you're reminded, for all the band's post-human rhythmic complexity, what a great rock drummer John Stanier remains. There's still the sense of thrill that comes from music where any element coming loose would mean everything falls apart, and there's the surprise that music this fussed over can still hit so hard.
In a way, that's been the constant in their career, and there's often the feeling here that Battles haven't forgotten their pre-Tyondai days, where they seemed to be applying the hyper-detailed structures of math-rock to the feel of minimal techno. Battles' early EPs offered one of those shouldn't-work-but-does hybrids: prog rock, with all its furrow-browed instrumental digressions, that still somehow follows the straight-line pulse of dance music. The difference is that they learned how to be a (far) left-field pop band on Mirrored, and there probably wouldn't be much thrill in ditching that just to look backward. Though the tone remains gleefully plastic and mechanical, Gloss Drop is less forbiddingly dense, chilly, and opaque than those instrumental EPs. "Sweetie and Shag", with appropriately dream-pop-esque vocals from Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino, is the most tender song the band's ever recorded, not a praise term you would have previously applied to Battles. If those early records resembled an auditory obstacle course, this is more of a playground, strange but inviting. Not for nothing does so much of Gloss Drop resemble carnival music, both in the "rides and games" and "Caribbean parade" senses of the word.
Sometimes this slave-to-the-rhythm approach doesn't quite come off, as on "Futura", where trad dance-rock is just given a frosting of virtuosity. There are moments like this on Gloss Drop where you remember Battles are capable of so much more than trad anything. And there are also times when the joyous silliness that runs through the record becomes oppressive, like the band's hammering you with the fact that serious music can also be super whimsical. But when it all comes together, as it does more often than not, it works on every level. "Ice Cream", with vocals from dance producer Matias Aguayo, is both the band's biggest and best pop moment since "Atlas", with a real disco bounce, but also totally perverse in its construction, like a mutated Phoenix single. And on "My Machines", they even call down that old (literal) tech metal thunder, with the added bonus of a big drama-queen performance from Gary Numan, one of their spiritual fathers in linking electronics with rock. Despite all the guests, and the nods to global pop, Gloss Drop will still be best enjoyed by groove heads, whether they come from the rock or dance worlds, but if you worried Battles would run out of surprises on album two, who knew they'd find common ground between post-punk devotees, Yes fans, and the children of UK funky?
