Category: concert reviews

Photo by Andrew Youssef (Stereogum).

In support of their latest album, Gloss Drop, Battles graced Los Angeles with a night of experimental rock stylings this Monday, headlining a show at Club Mayan in Downtown LA with tour-mates Walls and Nisennenmondai. The Italian electronic duo Walls opened the show. Working from a a table stacked with samplers, drum machines, effects pedals and other miscellaneous gear, they played a handful of lengthy hypnotic movements characterized by blissful ambience and textures morphing over steady electronic beats. Next came Nisennenmondai, an all-girl three-piece band from Tokyo, who pummeled through an otherworldly and upbeat set of progressive and moody instrumentals. With layered guitar loops, steady bass lines and evolving drum patterns, Nisennenmondai’s songs would typically begin with some minimal instrumentation and develop excitedly into epic freak outs (“Mirrorball”) or sometimes remained stubbornly dense with tension until a song’s anti-climactic ending (“Fans”). The openers’ bands set the mood perfectly for Battles, who are in fact co-currating the next ATP where all three bands are slated to perform.

Fall break 2011 ended fantastically, for me, with a chance to see one of my favorite musical artists of the past couple years: St. Vincent. Even if you don’t listen to St. Vincent, you may have enjoyed frontwoman Annie Clark’s skills without even knowing it: she was a member of both The Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens’ touring band. Clark, a porcelain-skinned, deceptively-waifish singer and guitarist, is an artist whose sheer talent claws its way through the feeblest of earbuds, unable to be ignored—so you can imagine my excitement to see her perform live. Her talent—and there really is a considerable lot of it—was in full, spotlit, often overwhelming display on Tuesday night.