Review of Battles at The Button Factory on November 19th 2011
Review: Kevin Donnellan
Photos: Kieran Frost
John Stanier, the drummer with Battles, is topless. He has a good build. Not exactly svelte, but a flat enough stomach. How do touring musicians manage to keep a decent figure? Grabbing food in motorway garages surely isn’t the most carb conscious way of eating? Plus there’s the pretty constant drinking. Anyway he has a good build and his drum kit is at the front of the stage. Beside him Ian Williams is messing about on two keyboards, he may be drunk. Dave Konopka is hunched down twiddling with dials.
There is a lot of twiddling. It’s twiddly music. Battles are arguably the unofficial figurehead for experimental/post/math/whatever-you-want-to-call-it rock. Having not seen them live before, there’s a worry that this will be too much of a chin stroking gig. Nodding appreciatively (like an asshole) at the technical excellence but never getting into it. They disabuse that notion straight out of the gate. It’s accomplished, it’s entertaining,but most importantly it’s fun. Catching-yourself-grinning fun.
There are cowbells. Two cowbells. Ian, sporting a fine moustache, hits them like a kid with one job in a nativity play, Good-build-John has his cymbal placed inordinately high over his drum kit, as if he’d be too tempted to hit it constantly if it was within easy reach. Dave just keeps fiddling (that doesn’t read great).
It’s one of those rare gigs where you never once find yourself wondering about the time. One song melts into another without them being indistinguishable. For a band with such a precise recorded sound everything appears surprisingly off-the-cuff. And that’s definitely a good thing, even the couple of missteps are enjoyable; like you’re catching them jamming in their basement.
And then they play ‘Atlas’! They apparently didn’t play it at Forbidden Fruit and word was they just don’t perform it anymore. But there it is, and it’s great, they mess around with it, holding the vocals back late, going off in tangents, it’s wonderful.
The visuals are brilliant too. Sometimes showing vocalists standing in two projections staring blankly out at us, the picture getting chopped up in time with the sound. And the ice-cream visual for, well ‘Ice Cream’ aids probably the best part of the whole show, starting off like they don’t know properly the song before getting progressively faster and tighter.
It’s all still within chin-stroking territory because, well, you’d look like a bit of a bell-end pogoing at a Battles gig. But it doesn’t matter, not enjoying this seems close to impossible. At one point Dave asks us what better place is there on Dublin on a Saturday night? We’re all too cynical to give him a good response, but whatever about Dublin there are few bands I’d rather see on a Saturday night.
