With their bracing debut single, Battles offered a new vision of indie rock. The quartet turned prog grandiosity, funk propulsion, and anarchic No Wave spirit into songs Rube Goldberg may have admired. With the vocals of early member Tyondai Braxton or the slew of subsequent guests, they suggested a sort of cyborg pop, as brawny as it was brainy. For a while there, Battles sounded like little else.
But Battles have been perpetually beset by instability. Braxton quit after their colossal first LP, 2007’s Mirrored, leaving drummer John Stanier, multi-instrumentalist Ian Williams, and guitarist Dave Konopka to recruit multiple vocalists for 2011’s wild-eyed follow up Gloss Drop. They tried life as a frenetic instrumental trio on 2015’s La Di Da Di. Following Konopka’s departure in 2018, Stainer and Williams return to the Gloss Drop template for their fourth album, Juice B Crypts, gathering a diverse roster of singers to slip into the narrow spaces inside their meticulous instrumentals. Jon Anderson (yes, from Yes) splits the singing on “Sugar Foot” with fascinating Taiwanese band Prairie WWWW. Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus, meanwhile, sings on the final two-song suite, “Last Supper on Shasta.”
Captivating tidbits rattle inside each of these 11 tracks, thrilling details that, when found, hit like syringes of adrenaline—the synths that seem to scream “Woo” when Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler finishes his verse on “IZM”; the pitch-shifted electronics that chase Xenia Rubinos like laser-guided missiles at the start of “They Played It Twice”; the West African guitar line that warps into a fractal midway through “Ambulance.” Amid the rubber-band snap of “Titanium Step,” the Pentecostal yelp of Liquid Liquid’s Sal Principato is a pure delight, flashing back to the Talking Heads and Battles’ own early work.
But the more you listen, the more these intricacies suffocate inside arrangements too busy for their own good. The instrumental title track seems to ride a dozen merry-go-rounds at once. And the sounds around Garbus simply won’t let her do the work, breathlessly modulating in every direction and stranding her inside the chaos.
Many of these songs feel like knots of ideas superficially strung together. “They Played It Twice” pivots between Rubinos’ electrifying lead and mutated breakbeats, but Battles never bother to make the ideas cohere. “IZM” hops from boom-bap thrust to astral krautrock projection, leaving Butler to repeat uncharacteristically pedestrian phrases, clutching them like guylines. Only “Fort Greene Park” shows restraint. Battles slowly build a single theme, sharing it between slicing guitars and spiraling electronics. Just before it spills into bedlam, they lasso it back, leaving something to the imagination.
Juice B Crypts is anti-gestalt music, where incredible parts are subsumed by wholes that try to do too much. You’re left to wonder if Stanier and Williams feel they have to prove themselves again. Or perhaps they’re aware that the polyglot power that made their early work so powerful is almost passé now, as the lines between genres corrode. Either way, Juice B Crypts is an act of overcompensation from a duo trying to make too much happen with less.
Buy: Rough Trade
