Between them the three members of New York experimental rockers Battles span a particularly prolific part of the history of angular American art-rock and post-Hardcore, having been individually formerly involved with Don Caballero, Lynx, and Helmet. Since 2007’s Mirrored they’ve produced some of the most fiercely intelligent, odd-ball but unexpectedly pleasurable music of the last decade. Since the departure of lead vocalist Tyondai Braxton in 2010, despite a few vocal guest spots on 2011’s Gloss Drop the band’s rhetoric has been most definably musical, and Gloss Drop had some of their most brilliantly idiosyncratic moments to date.
For all the ADHD-distinguished intelligence that has become synonymous with the band while they were still a quartet, the amount of fun Battles can be is something that can often get overlooked. “Ice Cream,” the lead-off single from Gloss Drop featuring Matias Aguayo, was the first sign that the band’s plan of attack came with a sense of self-awareness and the want to just have a right old knees up. La Di Da Di, completely devoid of vocal appearances, sees them take that aesthetic in a full-throttle manner, and although the craftsmanship is often still there, simplicity and tunefulness more frequently raise their heads.
Opener “The Yabba” expresses their progressive, schizophrenic tendencies via a series of revolving bleep cycles giving way to a mid-paced groove, completed by a sense of depth and John Stanier’s improvisational hi-hat wizardry. So far, so Battles, but the stripped back and scratchy approach to synth loops of the follow-up track “Dot Net” moves without much of that attention to detail and as a result doesn’t really go far enough to justify its place. The gloriously dense Eastern-tinged guitar lead romp of “FF Bada” comes next and is probably the finest demarcation of the band’s appetite for fun to date. There’s a slight shade of melancholy to sunshine-imbued drumless psychedelia of “Cacio E Pepe,” and the robust stabs of guitar on “Non-Violence” juxtaposes the song’s written ethos nicely, as does Stanier’s formidable flitting between rhythms.
The delirious pop-rock funk of “Dot Com” is arguably the closest Battles have ever come to writing a conventional pop tune, and is again one of the occasions on which the endearing simplicity pays off. “Tricentennial” and “Megatouch” see tongues ever-so-slightly removed from cheeks as the trio knuckle down into more considered, cerebral time signatures and weirder melodies, the musicianship on the latter particularly refined.
There are moments where Battles fall well-short of being as intriguing as we’ve come to expect, and indeed as intriguing as they sometimes are on La Di Da Di. The wooshes of synth and melody on “Summer Simmer” do create an odd-ball sense of 4th dimensional beach-combing, but never does the track catch one off guard. “Tyne Wear” just feels like an off-cut from the end of a deleted track thrown in to beef up the tracklist. The closer “Luu Le” follows much the same format as the opener in terms of both its pace and myriad of slightly hypnotic synth incantations but ultimately feels more like slightly more imaginative muzak than anything that’ll make you sit up and shout “FUCK!”.
Overall, the consistent lack of the depth Battles have expunged in abundance throughout the past is nagging, and finds moments on La Di Da Di sneaking into the corners of a territory the band have never looked like entering; mediocrity. However, there are a handful of tracks here that have a distinct head-bobbing enforcing mechanism at their core, and are dangerously good fun because of it.
Rating: 3/5