3 out of 5

Produced by: Battles

Label: Monitor

Though certainly a more well-rounded listening experience than B Ep, C still comes up a bit short overall, its collection of tracks once again acting more like a single than an extended play.

I know I waffle quite a bit on what constitutes a perfect EP, but that’s because context, for better or worse, matters.  Sometimes these things are a stop-gap between releases; sometimes they’re ‘teasers;’ sometimes they’re full-fledged productions carrying as much impact as an album.

Battles, being a post-Don Caballero project, had a lot of whispery hopes buoying expectations; that the group’s first appearances would be across two labels, a single and a couple EPs, and all with oblique song titles and album art, felt sort of like the band was toying with us.  Is this what Battles sounds like?  It made it really difficult to say.

C, opening with B+T, seems to make us want to think that Battles will sound like American Don-era Don Cab.  Which is a grand thing.  The syncopated, crisp drumming, the intertwining and building keys and guitars, the general ebb and flow – buildup, payoff, math rock awesomeness.  The ambient UW follows, buzzing and bleeping and wandering and giving us haunting memories of Ep B’s BTTLS, but thankfully the track is only a few minutes long, so it counts as a viable segueway to HI/LO, certainly intended as the disc’s second ‘feature,’ and giving us a pretty good indication of the kind of stripped down sound the band would use on Mirrored‘s Tonto.  Unfortunately, for me, HI/LO never gets to the level of Tonto, layering its elements but only to a certain point.  It almost feels like they weren’t sure what direction they wanted to take the song – freak out, drone – and so they just let it play out without much fanfare.  The final two tracks are interesting but come across as something like B-sides, with IPT-2 remixed elements from other tracks (like probably IPT 2…), and TRAS 2 starting out pretty chipper but ditching it all for a free-wheeling drum solo.  Which is certainly impressive but not necessarily what we came to the party for.

C Ep might be a more comprehensive listen than B Ep, but it still feels like a taste test, with a really great opening track and then a few supporting tracks, each with interesting bursts but nothing near as notable as that first one.