Musical Musings

My earliest memory of Skidmore’s math rock outfit Slim Charles involves drunkenly trying to dance to their off-beat grooves (see “Words”) at a bar (or was it Falstaff’s?) well over a year ago. I remember heckling the bandmates for recordings, but couldn’t get anything more than cell phone quality videos recorded at said bars. Now, my dream has finally come true: their EP, Versus Fatso Jr., has been masterfully recorded and released. Listen to “Triangulate” above, then download the EP here. Some of the best use of distortion I’ve heard in math rock in a while.

Fibonacci sequence spotted in Ahleuchatistas’ “Now, Now is Then” (starts about thirty seconds in). Seems the poor bastards took the term “math rock” literally, but it turned out pretty well for us.

On Battles’ Gloss Drop, and the loss of Tyondai Braxton

(click play to listen to “Africastle,” the opening track of Gloss Drop while reading)

So I’ve never really done anything that could resemble an album review before, so bear with me. I’ll start with this: Gloss Drop is fucking fantastic. I actually look forward to listening to it, I can’t say that about many albums lately. In spite of that, it’s not a perfect album from front to back. Like Mirrored and EP C / B EP, it is strongly pulled down by some weak and “filler” tracks. But the strong tracks are more than good enough to make up for that. That being said, the first five songs on Gloss Drop are probably the best twenty-seven minutes of music Battles has put out to date. But then Gary Numan shows up, then a few songs that are less than two minutes, then some uncharacteristically poppy song that sounds nothing like Battles. Like I said, I wasn’t expecting an eargasm from beginning to end. Of course, somewhere deep down I thought that maybe, just maybe, they would improve where they had erred before (when I listen to Mirrored, I only actually listen to six out of eleven songs). Similarly, my listening routine with Gloss Drop involves skipping five of its twelve tracks, something I normally consider sacrilege.

So how does Tyondai fit in? Well, actually, he doesn’t. Just about all of the articles before the album dropped and now the reviews I’ve read were concerned with how the loss of Tyondai Braxton would affect Battles’ sound. What will they do without a lead singer? No bands survive after the singer leaves! Is this the end of Battles and the world as we know it? But if you know Battles, you know that vocals are not at all important. Tyondai wasn’t a lead singer, he was a band member who used his voice occasionally. On their first two EPs, B EP and EP C, the records on which Battles really established their sound, not one member made a peep. Gloss Drop’s “Futura,” perhaps its strongest track, sounds a lot like a perfected version of the style demonstrated in “Hi-Lo” from EP C. If anything, Tyondai’s pitch-altered voice might have distracted Battles from doing what they do best, interplay between musicians. Having less members probably forces the band to think more about how they interact with each other. And besides, they rely so heavily on Ian’s echoplex and extensive looping, that losing one member doesn’t really affect their ability to create a big sound live. So is Battles better off without Tyondai Braxton? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it certainly didn’t hurt.

To wrap up this “math rock” nonsense-

Piglet is a band that understands quality versus quantity. Their EP, Lava Land, is like the object lesson for math rock. It really is. It’s intense and pretty hectic at some points, but always lets up at the right time. No guitar pluck or bass drum kick is wasted. But, it’s all they have— the three-piece recorded these six songs totaling twenty-four minutes and released them in 2005, then that was it. But that was all they needed. Listen to “Anthropology Anthology.” 

Also, this is the only photo of them on the internet.

Excerpt from “Gibbon” by This Town Needs Guns

By nature, most math rock tends to focus on the music, with complex rhythms and weaving melodies and so on. Most bands tend to lack vocalists or instead use the voice as another instrument (see Battles, Toe, etc). Some bands are the exception to this rule, and This Town Needs Guns probably do it best.

This excerpt from “Gibbon” beautifully shows how they do it. The riff begins as chords are punched in quarter notes in 4/4 over a simple drum beat, with every third bar in 6/4. Standard so far. Enter vocals, at first quiet and wistful (You brought this on yourself…). Soon after, the chords become arpeggiated and the drummer begins to decorate the beat as the lyrics become more sentimental and the vocals more intense (The time we spent apart served to remind me of when we talked…). We must be building to a climax, right? Some big instrumental break? Nope. In the moment where I first realized This Town Needs Guns had their shit together, the band cuts the idea down to its most simple iteration where we least expect it. Instead of hitting quarter notes, the guitars now play only a single, sparse chord in 6/8 while the drummer continues in 4/4, creating a great little polyrhythm. It really conveys the lyrics’ emotion of melancholy and letdown. Abundance of sound one second, emptiness and gaps the next. They slowly begin to fill in the empty spots and build up to the chorus for one last time to close the song. I always say this to myself, but this is why I listen to music.

Excerpt from Battles’ “Hi-Lo”

It’s as if John Stanier knows exactly what I want to hear when I listen to this kind of stuff. The way he handles the sharp rhythms of “Hi-Lo” is brilliant, really unlike any other drummer in the genre. Endlessly precise yet dynamic. And look at that face. When playing he looks like he’s studying for the GREs.

Excerpt from “Nag Champa” by Enemies.

A simple phrase begins about halfway through the song: bumbum, bumbum, bumbum, dodo; bumbum, bumbum, bumbum, bumbum, dodo (alternating between three and four bumbums each go-around). The drums come in and, after playing along with the rhythm, soon begin to play a beat with the snare in 4/4 (but cleverly keeping the bass drum with the guitar phrase), providing a beautiful rhythmic contrast. Another guitar riff is added, soon another atmospheric melody is played on top, and the intricate polyrhythm that began the section ceases to sound so complicated as it sits underneath. Thanks, Enemies. Thenemies. 

Maps and Atlases’ first LP, Perch Patchwork, is noticeably more laid-back, a move away from the frantic mathiness that characterized their first two EPs. But, unlike a few math rock bands that precede them (I’m looking at you Foals), their roots are subtly present: listen to “Pigeon.”