Battles Fights for Originality

"Every time your cell phone doesn't work the way you want it to, you have the same feeling," he notes. "Sometimes my something-or-another pedal doesn't work in front of a lot of people on stage, and I'm like, 'Shit, this is no good.' And I kind of wish that I just had a guitar and an amp again. But it's a little part of the thrill of trying to pull it off, like there's always random crap that is going to freak out and not do what you want it to do. You have to adapt, and that actually affects the live element of what we do. It goes back to the balance of the organic spontaneousness of human beings and the more robotic nature of things."

Acts that rely heavily on timed beats and continuous loops tend to have predictable live shows. Battles, however, has subverted this by focusing specifically on being a rock band that sweats human grease and emotion.

"It's more like these songs have this process that they have to go through to be built up," Williams offers. "Somebody has to set the loop, and then there are the layers of the loop, and then different people give each other cues to go into different sections. So it's sort of like those are all the variables. And so each one, each time, could be different in the way those things transpire.

"The thing is, we actually play the loops live," he adds. "We have a big rock drum set, and we all have guitars and bass guitars and keyboards. We run everything through big amplifiers on stage, whereas electronic bands will just run everything directly through the P.A. system so that it has a much more dry, clinical sound. We are the halfway point between those realities. I see our stuff really as a sort of garage band of 2007. We are technologically where things are right now, mixed with our own rock histories."

To that end, if Battles is an outfit that's almost too modern for its own good, then what does the future look like for the four-piece?

"My parents always said, 'You've got to go to college, you've got to get a real job,'" Williams recounts. "So I always thought that that kind of thing would happen to me. Although at this point, I've kind of put that off for so long that I don't think I'll ever have a real job."

"I'd rather do this than anything else," he concludes. "But I did go to college, so I can do anything."