Incessantly Rhythmic

Alright, this is really cool. Apparently there is a production company called "Rainbo Video" that has a series of full concerts from the Empty Bottle posted on Youtube. I love the 21st century.

I've posted a sixty-minute one for the all-instrumental band Battles as a segue. The muscianship is insanely good; the drummer, incredible. How he's staying focused through this, I'm not sure. In fact, it feels like I'm missing out when the window playing the video now is obscured.

But how these guys' debut full-length, Mirrored, made so many top-ten lists is beyond me. (And they made a lot influential ones: Pitchfork at #8; Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker and the world's best music critic at #3; and Jon Pareles of the Times and the world's second best music critic at #8.) The music is beyond post-industrial -- there's lots of scratching, blizzards of notes, keyboard chords that fall somewhere in there, strange vocal samples. The only instrument that sounds like an instrument is the drums. There's no melody. In short, it's incessantly rhythmic. How this appeals to so many tastemakers (critics and indie-rock fans everywhere) confuses me. How Jason Crock of Pitchfork could write of the record, "displaying humor and charm without words, yet still feeling authorless and monolithic," confuses me more. (I'll avoid the obvious joke with the last name "Crock.") How can a piece of music, unless it's ancient or spritual or folk, be declared authorless? Is it the aural equivalent of open source software? As further proof of how mediocore this is, my girlfriend has made me turn off the video playing in the background while I'm posting.

How did Battles rank so high when the National's most recent record, Boxer, also released last year, only hit #17 on Pitchfork. Not only does the National, a Cincinnati-to-Brooklyn quintent, have an impeccable drummer too, the record is nearly flawless. The song compositions are well-detailed and edited thoughtfully. Overall, it's a perfect example of a modernist record (even if these are post-modern times): totally urban, very concerned about form, strangely but unabashedly concerned about romance.

Anyway, here are my three other favorite records of the year, for what it's worth to the world at-large:

* Feist - "The Reminder" (Even lower than "Boxer" on Pitchfork, but at least every music critic at the Times loved it.)
* Do Make Say Think - "You, You're a History in Rust" (Their show at the Middle East last September might've been the best I ever saw.)
* Panda Bear - "Person Pitch" (Pitchfork's #1 choice, so I'm not just hating on them.)

Thanks to Allison for the post's title that capture Battles so well; and for redesigning my band's MySpace page (see the link at left for the Horse Latitudes if you are one of the few readers of this blog that didn't know that page already exists.) And thanks to Lauren for explaining how to embed video within a post.