Battles: La Di Da Di

Battles’ third album, La Di Da Di, feels like a return to something elemental and specific in the band’s history. It is satisfyingly clean, echoing the bright, shiny flatness of the current digital landscape. It’s as basic as these guys can get, which all said, isn't especially basic: The music feels like a highly-saturated, highly-composed Takashi Murakami print, or a website that needed a lot of programming to make it look as basic and usable as possible (not for nothing are there songs here called "Dot Com" and "Dot Net").

They could’ve easily gone in a different direction. After a series of early EPs, Battles had their breakout with their 2007 debut LP, Mirrored, a collection bolstered by the single, "Atlas", a propulsive track featuring the sped-up, processed vocals of Tyondai Braxton: part man, part machine, part Saturday morning cartoon. It was bouncy, energetic, instantly memorable, and had an appropriately shiny, cathartic video that found the group performing the song in a glossy, glassy cube. It also meant they had a de facto "frontman."

But Braxton left while Battles were recording the followup, 2011’s Gloss Drop. As a result, the remaining members invited a few guest vocalists to contribute: Gary Numan, Kazu Makino, the Boredoms' Yamantaka Eye. The biggest song was the sunny, poppy "Ice Cream", which featured vocals from Chilean producer Matias Aguayo. It didn’t necessarily sound like Battles, but like "Atlas", it had a great, sexy video and got a lot of traction. Expanding the number of knob turners, Gloss Drop was followed by a remix collection, Dross Glop, that included reworkings by Kode9, Shabazz Palaces, Gang Gang Dance, the Field, Hudson Mohawke, and others.

That’s a lot of cooks, for sure, and when your core group features players like heavy-hitting drummer John Stanier (Helmet, Tomahawk), virtuosic guitarist/keyboardist Ian Williams (Don Caballero, Storm & Stress), and bassist/guitarist Dave Konopka, vocals and additional hands aren’t necessary. These are expressive, inventive players who know how to compose and execute in interesting, affecting ways. They can basically "talk" through their instruments, and it was a good move to strip things back on La Di Da Di, a vocal-free collection heavy on repetition. You might think of Trans Am, Factory Floor, or Zombi, but it’s squarely Battles. The various vocalists on Gloss Drop gave that collection a kind of chaotic or "various artists" feel—here there’s a solidity and feeling of forward motion.

It’s at its best early, especially on the almost-7-minute opener, "Yabba", which starts with a wash of colorful feedback before moving into a tight pulse of keyboards that sound like guitars, guitars that sound like keyboards, and rumbling drums and bells. (This is echoed in the final song of the collection, "Luu Le", which feels like a deconstruction of what came before it.) La Di Da Di succeeds when you’re on the edge of your seat. It’s less successful, mostly in the middle and toward the end, when things start to come off a bit like playful incidental ambient bits or post-rock circus music.

The best songs bring to mind super specific images (here were a few of mine: a landscape of yellow parakeets, an HTML version of the Who, a Magic Rock sculpture, "attack of the Sea Monkeys", the recent Earth catalogue sped-up and painted neon, a mime dressed in a rainbow-colored unitard), and that’s part of what makes Battles interesting. Things drag here and there, mostly when they move away from hyper speed to mid-tempo, and when Stanier’s drums take a bit of a backseat to the instruments piling up in front and around them. During those moments, Battles sound like too many instrumental acts with chops, and lose what makes them special. At 50 minutes, it's maybe a bit too long: when you're working with coiled energy, you can't afford to lose momentum. That said, when they're in the zone, there's not much like it.