4 out of 5

Label: Warp

Producer: Battles, Keith Souza (recorded by)

Right, so, CAN DO NO WRONG??  …which was sort of the feeling behind the lead-up to Battles release, as Don Cab fans watched that band (essentially) crumble after the staggering genius of ‘American Don’ and then several staggering geniuses – including Ian Williams of Cab, and then let’s get the hardcore Tomahawk fans in on the gig with John Stanier on drums, and hey, here’s that other awesome band you’ll start to like after-the-fact, Lynx, offering up guitarist Dave Konopka – staggered into Battles, releasing several mysterious (and uneven) EPs that, as is parenthetically stated there, were pretty duffin’ uneven but maybe they were just so technically complicated as to be over our heads so NO WRONG DONE AND HERE’S OUR FUCKIN FULL LENGTH ALBUM OF NO WRONGS

.  Mostly.  ‘Mirrored’ is intensely listenable.  It takes a few listens to smooth out the let-down of pace the album goes through after its first few songs (with track 5’s ‘Leyendecker’ and its staccato electro-beat throwing the mix off), but once you know where to expect the highs and lows, even wandering, looser tracks like ‘Bad Trails’ will find a toe-tapping place in your, er, heart.  But I noticed that after the rush was over, ‘Mirrored’ didn’t stick in my player for as long as expected.  Certainly not as much as the last couple pre-reformation Don Cab releases, and not even as much as my preferred Helmet records.  What gave?  It was wicked awesome math rock, right?  And all the songs were winners?  But: the album, I believe, lacks a sense of emotion beyond playfulness, and furthermore… lacks cohesion.  Besides the opening and closing tracks echoing each other somewhat, I have never once gotten the feeling that this is a BAND at work, and that this was an ALBUM.  ‘Mirrored’ feels like a collection of tracks by skilled session musicians.  They are expertly – expertly – performed and produced, no beats missed, every build and release where you’d want it to be, but in the same way that the EPs felt like scattered thoughts surrounding one or two set songs, ‘Mirrored’ seems like the opposite, jams with all of the organic bits scraped away.  This would seem like an ‘all killer no filler’ setup, but that’s where the lack of emotion harms the final product, and it’s something that seemed to carry over moreso to followup album ‘Gloss Drop.’  It’s not that it’s flashiness over substance at all; taking a look at the patient ‘Tonto’ or the misleadingly stagnant ‘Atlas’ tells of musicians who understand the balance of wizardry and songcraft, but by the same token, the range of sounds blitzing your way from the get-go of ‘Race: In’ feel like a celebration of skill more than a song, and an hour of this same approach is, as stated, very listenable, but doesn’t hit you in the gut at any point.

In the moment, though, these observations can’t possibly counter the unbelievably tempered theatrics of ‘Ddiamondd’ or ‘Tij,’ and while the distorted chipmunk vocals that pop-up seem off-putting at first, taken as simply another instrumental aspect of the disc ups the depth of the whole thing.

A stupid summary statement could be: ‘Mirrored’ might not be particularly filling, but it is freaking sweet.