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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Battles’ “La Di Da Di”

Battles

When Animal Collective gets the “post-Y2K Phish” tag, it’s more in reference to the group’s position as the house band for an individualism-allergic cultish hive-mind fan demographic—and a huge one at that. Reading the term “New Weird America” should have induced nausea when coined in 2003, but the bastardization of weird only spread, and regarding not so much the music, but the consistent overcompensating dependence on substance-free ALL-CAPS overt-ness, there remains a “Mr. Bungling of Experimental Music” thanks to nonsense like Man Man, CocoRosie, Yeasayer, John Maus and the adult-adolescent McDonald’s PlayPlace supervised by Dan Deacon.

To genuine music people who process listening experiences on a sonic, intellectual and emotional level, there’s a clear distinction between Battles’ body of work and the aforementioned hit squad poking experimental underground rock with a slow-acting poison-tipped umbrella. While 2011’s much-loved Gloss Drop had a few unsubtle and totally unnecessary organic-averse elements, this was probably in reaction to the preceding departure of founding member Tyondai Braxton. But third full-length La Di Da Di takes Battles’ proprietary musical invention that contemporaries were still far from catching up to, and makes the effort categorically futile.

The noticeable lack of Battles being referenced in other bands’ music is that even a grossly inadequate imitation is impossible to pull off. For the uninitiated, there isn’t the luxury of space to describe how co-founders Ian Williams (guitar and too much else to list), John Stanier (drums and ditto) and Dave Konopka (bass and ditto) make music, and as far as what it sounds like or the stylistic framework? The risk of appearing lazy and stepping out of the way to let this consummate artistic triumph speak for itself.

—Andrew Earles