idk.

Being born in the middle of the Eighties, the Cold War was merely something I read about in history class. But based on what my textbooks and The History Channel tell me, it was a time of paranoia and Us vs. Them. Nuclear winter was imminent at any notice; all someone had to do was push a little red button and it was all over.

That said, I don’t know what that feeling was like. Terrorism is too local and isolated of a phenomenon for me to really lose sleep over, these days. During the Cold War, we were talking about full-on nuclear war. That amount of fear and dread is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. But I feel that if there was one ideal document for those feelings, it would be The Sound’s 1980’s debut album, Jeopardy.

Released on the Korova label (home to fellow gloomy new wavers Echo & The Bunnymen), on the surface it sounds like any other English band with eyeliner and guitars. It was dark and it was brooding. But the lyrics paint a different picture, with the focus seemingly on socio-political aspects of the times. England in 1980 was not a time for beautiful music. Thatcherism was the new modus operandi. Punk rockers pointed their fingers and blamed “them,” post-punk singers blamed themselves.

But Adrian Borland’s lyrics screamed of something beyond self-pity and doubt. Guided by a steady rhythm section that churned methodically like a heartbeat, he found his source of anguish beyond and within England’s borders. On “Missiles,” he finds it in the military-industrial complex that ran the world as he knew it. “Heartland” seemingly mocks (or supports?) the political nationalism of the era.

The band would follow up with 1981’s also-excellent From The Lion’s Mouth, but nothing would come close to the highs the band achieved with this record. Tragically, Adrian Borland would end up committing suicide in 1999.

Download: Live Instinct EP

[In 2002, Jeopardy was reissued with the four-song concert recording Live Instinct EP as bonus tracks. It has since gone back out of print.]

Despite all the acclaim their debut album, Mirrored, received last year, math rock outfit Battles still has their share of detractors. To some, listening to Mirrored was a cold, dead experience as their music lent almost very little, if any, soul or emotion. Fair, I say, but that does not make it any less of an incredible recording.

If anything, the vocals that multi-instrumentalist Tyondai Braxton (son of Anthony, the legendary saxophonist) lends to the songs makes their latest material far more accessible to the listener than the purely instrumental material released almost 4 years ago on the EP C and B EP records. His vocals may be indecipherable, but it adds a human quality that was lacking before. If you were familiar with the band before Mirrored, you were in awe of how precise and monumentally dense the performances were on record, you swore it had to have been done by robots. Daft Punk, eat your heart out.

My first experience with Battles was about 4 years ago when they supported The Icarus Line (remember when Penance Soiree was the shit for about a month?) on tour. Being new to the band when I first saw them, their performance blew me away with how simply incredible they were as musicians. You had to be there: my jaw hit the floor when Braxton and Ian Williams played the exact same melody on their keyboard while fingerpicking their guitars at the same time. John Stainer was an absolute beast on the drums. Watching them was like staring in awe at an enormous machine run like clockwork. But all the while the band hardly addressed the semi-hostile crowd, with the only acknowledgment coming in the form of garbled vocals from Braxton in between songs.

Fast-forward to last Wednesday night as Battles performed for a private audience at 86 in Hollywood as a warm-up for their Coachella gig that coming weekend. Fresh off their newfound fame from Mirrored, they breezed through a set off the album, including “Atlas,” “Leyendecker,” and the monstrous “Tonto.” Having seen them before I was knew what I was getting, but what amazed me most was how loose the band looked despite their music’s call for precision. Despite all the hopping around by Williams and Braxton, the notes came exactly when they were supposed to.

But perhaps the biggest surprise of the night came when Braxton greeted the audience with an unadulterated-by-knobs salute of “Wassup LA!” Battles had tore down the facade once and for all, and showed us that underneath the mechanized output was just some regular guys like you and me. That’s when you took a big sigh of relief and realized to yourself that you had made it out of Uncanny Valley.

You probably have heard or read something of the music we are playing and if you haven’t we would like to invite you into our musical world. First, the most important part of our music is the improvisation, which is done as spontaneously as possible, with each man contributing his musical expression to create the form.

Now — a little about the music called jazz. First it’s the player. In classical music it’s the composer. In jazz the composer is needed also, but it’s the player who makes jazz so invaluable.

So read the liner notes to The Ornette Coleman Quartet’s 1960 release, This Is Our Music. In 1959, Ornette Coleman was merely a newcomer to the American Jazz scene with his watershed release on Atlantic Records, The Shape Of Jazz To Come. And, oh, what a prophetic title it was.

The Shape Of Jazz To Come may sound tame to our ears today, but at the time the lack of a solid chord structure and wild and free improvisation was a sharp departure from the bebop of the era. Initially hailed by many as a talentless hack, his reception by the jazz vanguard was not a warm one. Dexter Gordon once kicked him out of a session, Miles Davis declared him to be “all screwed up inside,” and Max Roach punched him in the mouth during one of his performances at the Five Spot in New York.

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