Robot Lovin'
Summer albums include a robot takeover, an ’80s comeback, and homage to Michael Jackson.By Kriston Capps
August 6, 2007
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Battles, Mirrored (Release date: May 14, 2007)
The history of rock and roll music is one of progress, and when, in the none-too-distant future, intelligent machines have replaced every last axe-wielder, skins-pounder, and throat-screamer, it will seem that robots were rock’s inevitable destiny. Shifts that rock historians consider today to be great leaps forward—the British Invasion, the Year Punk Broke—will be marked as mere instrumental incursions along the inevitable path toward robots’ total dominance of sweaty, chest-pounding rock n’ roll. Carbon units will be advised to heed the great silicon revision of rock history: Battles, not Beatles.
It was in the late ’60s that Kraftwerk (and their kosmische musik peers) converted popular music into an analog format. Essentially, synth pioneers translated catchy melodies for vox, guitar, and rhythm section into catchy melodies for vocoder, Moog, and drum machine; the rest was electronica history. Battles, then, deserves the nod for taking back the digital spectrum for straight-up rock n’ roll.
Mirrored, the first full-length album by the New York-based quartet, sounds in places like nothing so much as krautrock 2.0. The first single, “Atlas”, features Tyondai Braxton’s digitally distorted vocals layered over a steady, heavy, swinging beat laid low on the toms by drummer John Stanier. Snippets of synchopated, hard-rock guitar feed into a synthesized crescendo that transforms the song into a bullet-train successor to Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express”.
Despite the laptop enhancements, real-time processing, and keyboards that mark both the album and the live show, Battles is hardly an electronic act. Stanier drummed for the smart postrock outfit Helmet; Dave Konopka and Ian Williams wielded guitar for math-rock mainstays Lynx and Don Caballero, respectively. The looped guitars on the assembly-line anthem “Race:In” and the shifty time signatures on the frenetic “Ddiamondd” are math rock for advanced-placement students. Braxton’s vocals—which are digitally Doppler shifted toward the end of the spectrum that dogs alone hear—certainly sound artificial; however, his digivox come hot on the heels of The Knife’s 2006 Silent Shout and its distorted, Native Americana chants.
Remarkably, Mirrored marches to a pretty even drummer. The heavy swing beat on “Atlas” is typical; “Leyendecker” opens with another punctuated beat, albeit one that sounds as if it’s stripped of its more organic-sounding tones. Throughout the song, Stanier disappears and reappears with that rhythm, reintroducing it with a hurry-up flourish that could be borrowed from an IDM standard. But the core beat remains: steady and braggy — even bluesy throughout.
When Stanier cuts loose (for example, with the clanging backbeat on “Snare Hangar”), he still plays it straight. It’s not clear that anyone else in the band is afforded that luxury. The album sounds as if it would take a small IT department to translate all its digital micro-engineering into a live show, but the trio manages it. On Mirrored, the bluetooth-enabled instruments don’t detract from driving, essentially guitar-driven rock songs. “Tij”, for example, is a blistering, seven-minute race to the finish between a synthesizer line whose sound changes in a subtle way with every iteration and a maddeningly percussive guitar verse.
Only once on the album does the band lose itself in clichéd prog atmospherics, on the meandering “Bad Trails”. And for the most part, Battles has retired the traditional math-rock arpeggio, though it creeps up now and then to annoying effect. Where Mirrored exceeds is in its heavy, manufactured marches: supercomputer music fit for a rock n’ roll band.
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Chromeo, Fancy Footwork (Release Date: May 8, 2007)
Chromeo might very well have been a product of the 1980s: If, say, Anthony Michael Hall had plugged in all the variables for a perfect band into his Weird Science algorithm, Chromeo is surely the group he would have summoned. The white-hightopped, blazer-sporting due of Pee Thug and Dave 1 have mastered the blazing synths, kicking beats, and self-sure lyrics that made for the best in pure, indulgent, 1980s machismo. Fancy Footwork, the sophomore album by the Montreal- and New York–based duo, is like a thesis on archetypal male narcissism.
The album lacks a floor-filling sequel to “Needy Girl”, a classic boast from the group’s 2004 debut, She’s in Control. On “My Girl Is Calling Me (a Liar)”, the pair descend into sketch territory when a vocoder-enhanced Pee Thug gives Dave 1 a pep-talk about his girl. (It’s mercifully brief.) “Momma’s Boy”, an Oedipal slam, is almost unbearably cheesy—but then, nothing on the album isn’t, or rather, it resists that criticism altogether. While the slimey-sensual French singing on “Opening Up (Ce Soir on Danse)” is funny, Trans Am beat Chromeo to that punch with faux-machismo Cubano lyrics on 2004’s TA. Chromeo makes up for some misfires with “Outta Sight”—a jam that depicts with absolute clarity a decade’s worth of Casio braggadocio.
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Justice, † (Release date: June 11, 2007)
Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay aren’t as well known for their work as other artists are. The French duo Justice have mixed for just about everyone in pop (Daft Punk, Franz Ferdinand, Fatboy Slim, and even Britney Spears) to the acclaim of just about everyone in dance (2 Many DJs, Erol Alkan, and Tiga). Kanye West certainly didn’t think Justice deserved the attention when he interrupted the MTV Europe Music Awards last year, mounting the stage to protest their recognition over his own nomination. With †, the duo may yet find notoriety—at least among skeptical natives who doubt Justice holds to the standards of pure Parisian dance.
Never mind those snobs. If to some extent, Augé and de Rosnay have stepped out of the DJ booth and onto the stage, it’s for the better; † is not merely a collection of songs to be sorted into dance playlists (However, if there is, in fact, any justice in the world, “Do the D.A.N.C.E., 1-2-3-4-5” will be on everyone’s lips by the end of the August. “D.A.N.C.E.”, an homage to Michael Jackson, is a worthy contender for summer free-for-all jam.) A lack of lyrics doesn’t make hard-driving synth numbers like “Let There Be Light” and “Phantom” (as well as the tacked-on “Phantom Pt. II”) any less catchy. In fact, † has Augé and de Rosnay playing good angels to another, darker dance/pop crossover act that Justice resembles: The Faint.
Kriston Capps is a Washington, D.C.-based arts writer. He blogs at Grammar Police.
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