In a Green Man Minute: Battles
Live band! **
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** Seen at the 2007 Green Man Festival. Battles, who headlined the Green Man’s Folkey Dokey stage on Saturday night (playing opposite Robert Plant, who was on the main stage in front of arguably fewer people), provoked the first encore I witnessed at the festival. The audience simply howled until they reappeared.
We deserved the extra number, for we’d never seen anything like Battles: multi-instrumentalist Tyondai Braxton’s eerie, sampled, chipmunks-style singing (utterly incomprehenisble, but very compelling in a pre-verbal kind of way); drummer John Stanier’s possessed assault on his instruments; and the great, glorious, semi-tribal thrash that the full ensemble hammered out were quite overwhelming. Battles were the second-loudest act of the fest, and the most fun to watch.
The band is clearly at its best live, however, as those who’ve both seen them on stage and listened to their somehow pasteurized (read: overproduced) recordings can attest. Battles owes its life to Trans Am, but doesn’t match the latter’s in-studio finesse. Still, every honest lover of indie rock owes it to himself to listen to “Atlas” - whether the recorded version on the album Mirrored or, better, via YouTube (see embedded video below).
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“Atlas”, performed live at Chicago’s Empty Bottle (8:05; uploaded by rainbovideo)
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