Album Review

Battles – Tonto EP

• 10th Dec 2007

Battles are a New York City experimental math rock band. The latest EP features remixes of Tonto by Four Tet and Kompakt’s The Field and a reworking of Leyendecker with Brooklyn rapper Joell Ortiz.

Too be honest when I first sat down to listen to this I nearly switched it straight back off again and after the listening to the first two mixes of Tonto (coz yeah there’s four versions) I was wondering why NME had made such an outrageous statement as ‘Mirrored is the sort of album that the sharp kids will be citing as an inspiration in a decades time’ (Mirrored being Battles debut album) This meant either the world had gone mad or I wasn’t a sharp kid? So obviously the world, momentarily, had gone mad.

Then I started liking it- the Four Tet remix, Tonto (Live), Leyendecker all sounded good. If you like math/progressive rock already you’d love this. But if not you could like it to an extent –it’s a bit like Radiohead (without vocals) gone all funked up, with a bit of rap thrown in on Leyendecker feat. Joell Ortiz. I’m not exactly gonna rush out and buy any of this and when browsing in music shops I’ll probably skip the math rock section, but by the end of the EP I was – I admit- enjoying it.