image via Josh

If you and I were, say, sitting across a table right now, and you asked me about the Battles show on Saturday night, I would do the following things:
1. Stare very hard into the middle of your forehead, trying to telepathically beam the show straight into your brain, and then when that didn’t work,
2. Make a lot of robot noises and exaggerated gestures.
Because really, how do you describe Battles? The whole set, in my head, was a soundtrack to a war between humans and robots that was driving the robots to live in cities under the sea. They put on a show that is impossible to describe without a lot of hand waving and fish faces. But I’m going to try anyway. Forgive me.

When we showed up to the sold out show the Pleasureboaters were playing, and while I’m sure they’re a fine bunch of people, all of the punk and the screaming was too much for my cold-stuffed head. That called for a drink, and when we walked back on to the floor of Neumos, wiggling up to near the right side of the stage, the first thing any of us said was, “Woah, that’s a lot of amps.” We watched them set up a 7-foot-tall cymbal as the crowd pressed closer, and the excitement in the room was almost oppressive.

Who was that guy that walked out on the stage before the band, and frequently in between songs, encouraging us to clap? Was he their booster? The guy that owns their equipment? I know I’m a big grump, but it was really fucking annoying that some dude kept jumping up, letting us know when he thought we should be applauding, as though we couldn’t figure that out on our own.

Not that there was much time to be annoyed, because the band stepped on stage and did something, something amazing, for an hour or so. The thing about Battles’ live show is that their sound is so intricate and layered and stuck together that it’s impossible to know who or what is making what sound. The band played in a huddle, grouped around the drummer, who was the only one making verifiable noise, and he was doing so with both a lot of skill and a lot of sweat. I knew that something happened when the keyboardist stopped dancing and kicking long enough to run his hand along all of the black keys on his machine, but how could I pick it out of the rest of the song? And how the hell did Tyondai Braxton make all of those noises during the brief times he was singing? I suspect that Battles enjoy all of the comparisons to robot rock because at least half of them are actually robots. They had a lot of machines on that stage, but they couldn’t all be making all of those different sounds.

About halfway through the set a security guard suddenly leapt over the stage and into the crowd right in front of us, where he proceeded to wrestle a man who was clearly on a first name basis with some drug or another out the door and, one imagines, on to the street. But who had time to wonder about that, when Tyondai Braxton was mouthing along to the sound effects? Or was he making them with his robot self? Yeah, I’m pretty sure he and the drummer are both robots. Sweaty robots. To try to fool us.

It wasn’t too long after that that the crowd and the noise and the illness I’ve been overcoming ganged up and gave me the vapors, and I headed upstairs to drink some water and cool my suddenly light head. Walking up the stairs I encountered three or four great big police officers just in the process of leaving, so it looks like that thorough bag-checking at the door wasn’t for nothing. I grabbed a cup of water and headed over to the stairs by the coat check, where I found a full dance party in effect.

Battles encored with a “ballad,” encouraging the audience to slow dance with the people next to them, and suddenly the whole thing was over. On an album Battles is a good band, nice machine rock, smart and well put together. Live, though, the sound is much bigger, nearly epic, but also completely personal. They turned most of the crowd at Neumos into one throbbing, slack-jawed organism. If they had announced, in the interval between the end of the show and the encore, that they actually were robots and that we were now their human slaves, I’m not sure too many would have disagreed. Instead, we all tumbled out into the cold, standing around dumbfounded on the street and shrugging, asking, “What the fuck was that?”