La Di Da Di

The release of 'La Di Da Di finds' we us trying to make sense of just what Battles have done now. Dave Konopka, Ian Williams and John Stanier have turned the tables on themselves this time, confronted their own ideas of what Battles is - and here on their third album, have willed an answer to that question into existence. The tangled wires and entrails of Mirrored and Gloss Drop have been pulled out, flung against the wall and scraped into an unruly pile to be tread upon.

As the name might imply, La Di Da Di is a mushrooming monolith of repetition. Here is an organic techno thrum of nearly infinite loops that refuse to remain consistent. The rhythmic genus of Battles is here as ever; full frontal, heightened and unforgiving - the gauntlet through which melody and harmony must pass, assailed at every turn. 'The Yabba' squawks to life, tumbling down the stairs before it finds it's own dislocated gait. The title of "Dot Net" hints at its propulsive bait-and-glitch, while "FF Bada" and "Summer Simmer" twitchily reach dizzy heights of forward-gazing no wave bluster.

For a 'breather' "Cacio e Pepe" isn't much of a breather, all unsettling harmonic shafts of light, like a short walk on an especially strange beach. The album's middle section that it bookends with it's spiritual cousin "Tyne Wear" are surely some of the more mutated deployments of conventional rock instrumentation you'll have heard in some time. It's about at this point that you begin to realize the truly bionic re-imagining of what a band can sound like. That seems like hyperbole until you lurch into the eerie skank of "Megatouch", and by the time you realize that genre's been swept out the window you're thrown unapologetically through the percussive "Flora>Fauna" and into the seeming zerogravity of "Luu Le" which reveals itself to be a shapeshifting carnival ride, eventually depositing you gently at the exit gate - wondering how it is you'll explain what La Di Da Di means.