Battles at the Opera House

Battles are one of the most beloved experimental, instrumental, and just plain mental bands in the big old modern world.

I picked up Mirrored as soon as I heard ear-bender Atlas, and I've categorically failed to translate my fandom of that album into seeing them live, until last Sunday.

Seated at the Opera House wouldn't be my first choice of venues to see them - I would have been happy with the Enmore - but a Sydney Opera House flooded with light art as part of Brian Eno's Luminous festival?  Perfect.

However, the Battles lads got off to a slow start with Race: Out - it's my favourite track, and the guitars just sounded muddy.  But afterwards everything seemed to fall into place, and the thick bass loops, the demented carnival of keyboards, the stabbing guitars and the ferocious drumming that make Battles the unique freaks they are coalesced into their glorious cacophony.  

The set was over all too quickly, though they played pretty much all of Mirrored, extended their tracks, and played a few I didn't recognise.

We were high in the loft, which fortunately afforded a great top-down view of Battle's pedal array, and the sound was generally stunning after the brief initial sludgery.

Unfortunately the finale wasn't the ecstatic climax the rest of the show had been.  The first song after the encore, which I think was new, was absolutely epic, but the final track was more of a pretentious wank than the rest of the set.

Openers Palace of Fire, aka the original two thirds of Wolfmother were really quite good, apparently scoring the gig by sending in a demo to Brian Eno himself.  It was only their fourth show, and although the singer isn't really the greatest, for their fourth ever performance they roared with some truly heavy and credible rock and roll, which they should do really, given their pedigree.  Definitely will be interesting to hear what develops from Palace of Fire as opposed to the reconstituted Wolfmother.