College Times

Battles is an extremely difficult band to categorize. Veering from Mars Volta-like prog rock to free jazz to the tripped out weirdness of the Residents, Battles has done something that many bands strive for but few actually achieve: creating a sound that is truly all their own.

The band’s first full-length, Mirrored, is one of the best-reviewed albums of the year so far. Guitarist Ian Williams attributes the album’s near-unanimous critical appeal to the band’s diverse collage of sounds.

“It does sort of straddle a lot of different genres,” Williams said. “My view of a Battles show is like, the metal kid showing up, and then the hip-hop kid showing up, and then the indie pop kid showing up, and then the improv jazz kid showing up and none of them have ever met each other at a show before. They’re like ‘Who are you? This is my town! What are you doing here?’”

Williams said he knew the album turned out well when his girlfriend said she couldn’t stop listening to it during workouts at the gym.

“For my barometer, when she really likes something then I’m like, ‘okay, people will like it if she likes it,’” Williams said. “She likes pretty out there stuff, but then at the same time, she’s a little bit more of a mainstream music fan than I am, so I figured if somebody like that gets it, it’s going to be alright.”

Williams said Battles initially began as a solo project, but after asking vocalist Tyondai Braxton to contribute, he quickly realized it would be more than a solo album. Williams then recruited bassist Dave Konopka and former Helmet drummer John Stanier to complete the lineup.

“I knew between the four of us, there was a talented lineup, but it was sort of like, you could have a movie with great actors, but if you don’t have a good script, it’ll still be a crappy movie,” he said. “I think we had to find our roles within this band and find how it sort of went together. Each guy in the band is capable of making their own solo record pretty easily, and it was sort of like, ‘How do we create space for each guy to do their little tricks and how do we play off each other in a good way?’”

Although the album contains some studio trickery that would be difficult to replicate live, Williams said that the immediacy of a live show compares favorably to the unlimited options available in a studio setting. Williams said that some fans have come up to him after shows and told him that it took seeing the band multiple times in order to figure out how they pull off their live sound.

“It’s not like we’re hiding anything,” Williams said. “You can see us make all the sounds onstage and you can maybe sort of piece together a logic of how we make the music … It’s not like we’re just triggering a sample and the sound just appears. I think you can watch us. You can see we’ll set a loop onstage but we set it all live, there’s nothing prerecorded or anything like that.”

Despite their unique sound, Williams said Battles hasn’t had to endure many negative responses from audiences who want more standard fare.

“We have the benefit of being a loud band, so we can sort of overpower the audience no matter what,” he said laughing. “So maybe people are booing but we don’t know. You’re protected by the shield of your volume.”

Battles w/Ponytail, Rhythm Room, 1019 E. Indian School Road, Phoenix, 602.265.4842, June 28, 8 p.m., $12

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