5 out of 5

Label: Warp

Produced by: Battles, Keith Souza, and Seth Manchester

Let’s bring in all the best bits, and leave out the questionable bits.  Right?  Okay, now hit record.  And La Di Da Di.

Battles happened when we were all bummed about Don Cab essentially ending, the Damon Che continuance interesting but certainly not the same as what’d been brewing up through American Don.  That’s not to say Helmet / Tomahawk Stanier fans weren’t standing by, but certainly I wasn’t alone in viewing this as the next step for Ian Williams after Caballero.  (That’s also not to say that I’m not super happy to finally have gotten other guitarist Dave Konopka’s Lynx album, and that it’s pretty rawkin’ rawksome as well.)  (That’s also not to say that my feet are made of blueberries, in case that was coming up somehow.)  We snatches up the B, C and Tras EPs as soon as they happened, slobbering over them like fanboys do, but, again, I can’t be alone in feeling sort of wishy-washy about them: awesome math stuff deserving of whatever we’d imagined Williams would do, and then some long, rather dreary experimental noise pieces that made the EPs feel more like singles with B-sides.  Oh well.  The shows sold out anyway.

Later: Mirrored.  It was again a change.  Tyoandai Braxton was a bigger part of things, and there was singing.  And maybe less math.  Mirrored was awesome, genius in parts, massive, sprawling songs that felt like a purposeful shift away form guitar winky wonk toward more expansive soundscapes.  The downside of this was an all-hands-on excessive showcase tendency – evidence of that purposefulness in trying, verily, to change the tone.  The singles were excellent, and the other tracks were impressive, it’s just a somewhat exhaustive listen.  The bits and pieces don’t rub together perfectly.

Braxton was out, Gloss Drop was in, with another shift.  It took me a while to come around to how excellent the album is, but it can still be said to be the group finding their footing – post showing what they can do on Mirrored – and thus it’s not quite perfect yet.  Gloss has a great sound, overall, much more seamless than the debut, but there’s a safety to its shiny, happy tone, resulting in a heavy feeling of repetition midway through the disc.

Had La Di Da Di been Battles first release, I don’t think I would’ve appreciated it as much as I am.  This is what I would’ve wanted post Don Cab – sweet, sweet mathly compositions with insane twists and turns and a full disc-length experience that has you keeping the thing playing on a loop – but then I would’ve cast a more questionable gaze on the experimentations of Mirrored and Gloss, assuming they came later.  “Battles changed,” I would’ve said, and then who knows: maybe I would’ve sold everything, or it would’ve taken me that much longer to get used to the band.  So this was the right way to go.  This is maturity: growing up, doing your own thing, then coming back around and realizing your parents were right about some things, but you can still be you.  Back in is the clean, intricate plucking of the EPs, without the staid experimental stuff.  Back in is the open-eyed sound of Mirrored’s best tracks, but gone is the need to flesh that out with vocals or bombast.  And thankfully, the fun and momentum of Gloss Drop are maintained, but as room has been made for these other elements, we no longer have to worry about repetition.

You’ll spot all of this at different points of La Di Da Di, the album perhaps roughly split up into EP-like tracks from opener Yabba until Summer Simmer, the transitional Cacio E Pepe going into a couple of Gloss-y tracks until Tyne Wear transitions us to Tricentennial and Megatouch, which bring back Tonto’s sense of mystery and wonder, before wrapping back around to the pairing of Flora > Fauna and Luu Le, the latter a wonderful concluding tour de force of instrumental prowess.

These divisions are bull, of course, but at the very least, the idea the La Di Da Di has a sense of push and pull and flow is evident.  That it’s also the most confident and fun thing Battles have released to date is, sure, down to opinion, but I do think they’re on to something by offering a bit of what they’ve developed from each album tied together on one (excellent) disc.