Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
Battles :: "Ddiamondd"From Mirrored (Warp; 2007)
There’s a perverse anti-logic that pierces through “Ddiamondd” that’s hard to pin down, and it’s starting to drive me nuts. The verses, if you could call them that, run like crescendos in reverse, the buzzsaw guitar lines descending at terminal velocity before retreating to allow a revved-up axe to atonally counterpoint. It’s a foil that not so much wraps around as warps the song through and through, dosing the hypercaffeinated playfulness of the surface rhythm with an incongruous slow-motion subdermis. The weird thing is that none of this really clashes, and, like much of Battles’ up-coming Mirrored, it ends up sounding like a full-bodied 3-D jigsaw, rich in both musical colour and texture, jumping headlong into the fissure where the amorphous and the controlled cave in and, ultimately, don’t really matter anymore.
Alan Baban :: 12 March 2007 |
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