People Won't Be People

I love the first album by Battles, even though it could be counted as nostalgia by now (it is nearly a decade old...). But like The Young Gods in the late 1980s, they represented a sudden intrusion into the mundane world of popular music, which was rolling along, eating itself and shitting out broken celebrities and copies of a copy of an idea someone had in a shack during the 1920s.

I love it because it is so determined to expunge the human from the music. Despite being musicians who can play guitars and drums and that, the four members display such precision - especially in the outro to Tonto when, having gone through a range of modes (even knocking out a cheeky hornpipe), they slow down like a sleigh gradually being subsumed by snow... I saw them play this live, and it was astonishingly exact.

Vocals are distorted - like R'n'B singer feed through multiple distortion pedals, until only sound remains, no feeling, no words - and the rhythmic complexity shames a drum machine. Every song evokes a desolate city, the machines operating perfectly, producing products that have no consumers. 

Where The Young Gods harness technology to a romantic passion, Battles strap the aesthetic of techno to jazz, flipping styles like a robot burger chef. 

I listen to it, and pretend I am all machine. It's geometric and complicated. Sometimes it sounds like exercises in form. Purity. 

Finally, I read someone's guess at the lyrics to the 'big hit' Atlas. It goes...

People won't be people when they hear this sound...
Kitchen is the chef...
Scissors is the barber...