Well, last year I looked at some reissues as well, so I thought I’d do that this year as well. I wasn’t joking when I said I might not get this list finished until February. This is in alphabetical order.

Seefeel — Quique (Redux Edition)

This is nice. This forgotten shoegaze / techno crossover classic got a re-release for seemingly no particular reason. Not even an anniversary. If they’d waited until 2008 they could have done it for the fifteenth anniversary. I guess that for whatever reason they felt like the time was right to reissue it last year.

Scottish readers may be wondering, and I can confirm — this album’s title rhymes with ‘keech’. But the music itself is anything but.

This ‘redux’ edition comes with a full second CD of lost extra goodies. Tracks that inexplicably never made an album as well as alternate versions and remixes come included. My particular favourite — of both discs — is ‘Clique’. Why did this not make the album? It should have been a single!

Quique has a gentle ambient approach, like a wall or ocean of sound. I personally prefer the heavier, darker, more industrial sound of their follow-up, Succour. But Quique is nevertheless a fine album, and I’m happy to have picked up this double disc joy.

The Knife — Silent Shout (Deluxe Edition)

I missed this one first time around. Wasn’t quite interested enough. But when it was re-released as a three disc package I went for it. Maybe I was right first time round.

It’s actually a fairly good album. There are some good tunes. But I was disappointed. Given the rave reviews the album got, I very much found it a damp squib. Good to listen to from time to time though.

Maybe part of the problem is that I already knew one of this album’s tracks quite well. For that reason it suffers from that problem where one song seems to tower over the rest of the album. Even knowledge of this problem hasn’t prevented me from feeling a bit disappointed though.

The new extra discs give me much the same feeling. One is a DVD of a concert performance (An Audio Visual Experience) and all of The Knife’s videos. The other is a CD with the audio of the concert performance.

On CD it sounds quite good. About the same standard of Silent Shout. But watch the DVD and it just looks a bit ridiculous. It is about as live as Princess Diana. The vocals seem to be live, but that other guy clearly doesn’t know what to do with himself. If somebody is making that music live, it certainly isn’t him.

I’d love to believe that waving a couple of ridiculous looking glowing sticks in a pseudo-rhythmic (and often not even in sync with the music) manner is making all of those sounds. But I get the feeling that that awesome instrument hasn’t been invented yet.

I know that live electronic music is a bit of a grey area. But seriously. I prefer the “look like you’re checking your email” approach. At least that is less pretentious.

I enjoyed the music videos though. I will probably check out some of their older stuff if I see it going cheap somewhere.

White Noise — An Electric Storm (digitally remastered)

Already this has become one of my favourite albums of electronic music. I am absolutely in awe of it. Having read about the techniques used to make it, and just the sheer fact that it was so visionary, I really think this ought to be more famous than it is.

I have already written a suitably gushing review of it. I had forgotten how long it was. All those words and not a single comment! Gah.

That’s yer lot. Incidentally, I have been linking to my original impressions of the albums I have been listing in this series. But there was also a post where I wrote about 12 of them — a kind of mid-year roundup. If you are interested, you can read it here. You will notice that I was actually near enough on time with that one. Ironic really, given how busy I was at the time…

I went to see Battles a couple of weeks back. I already wrote about it the first time I saw them, so I won’t go on and on about it. Full reviews of the gig by Last.fm users are here and here.

In my view, this performance was even better than the one at Glasgow. It does feel a little bit like ‘Atlas’ overshadows the rest of the gig though! ‘Leyendecker’ was also quite an impressive performance.

There seemed to be a few technical issues. For some reason Ian Williams seemed to have problems with the looping, or the volume of his guitar or something. Show opener ‘Race: Out’ was ruined at first. The three guitarists quickly alternate turns playing twice a bar, but Ian Williams was too busy fixing his problem, leaving a big gap.

The impressive thing, though, was the way the band as a whole coped with the problem. Realising the performance was a dud, they just seamlessly started again near the beginning. I guess with all that technology involved, they must be pretty used to that sort of thing and they just took it in their stride. Many people probably did not even realise there was a problem (though they might have thought it was a bit long!).

Anyway, the point of this post is that Battles played at the Electric Proms last week. Tickets sold out before Battles were even added to the bill. The headliners? Editors. A slight mismatch perhaps. The wayward experimentalism of Battles was probably a bit of a shock to the system for the poor souls!

The full performance is available to watch on the BBC website until the 4^th of November. There is a taste of what I saw when Battles were faced with a problem. Dave Konopka had problems with the start of ‘Tij’. Not to worry — quick-thinking drummer John Stainer just improvised a bit. Nobody will notice!

I’m not much of a gigger really. In fact, since the first proper one I attended six years ago (My Vitriol, who must now rival Portishead as the slowest-working band in the world), the only other gig I’ve attended was a really awful local band in a pub. I was dragged along, and I haven’t really recovered since.

There are a few reasons for this. One of the main ones is that hardly any of the bands that I like ever play in Edinburgh. My brother says this is because Edinburgh has a 10pm “noise curfew”. WTF! It’s meant to be a city of culture, but no music is allowed in case it wakes up Tarquin. Shameful.

The trek from Kirkcaldy to Glasgow is tiring, time consuming and expensive. But I don’t think anything would have been able to prevent me from seeing what Battles are like live.

Of course, we had to endure a shite support act first. The Penpushers have four members, but only two of them ever seemed to be doing anything at any one time. (My brother pointed out that one of the members was called Obsolete — and wasn’t he just!)

The music was nothing special. I think if this was fifteen years ago, when DJ Shadow was at the height of his popularity, this would have felt fresh and maybe even exciting. Today, the sound is rather dated and underwhelming.

At one point the frontman bemoaned the lukewarm reception, calling the audience “an Edinburgh crowd”. But they deserved an Edinburgh reception. Especially since we were about to see possibly the most futuristic band around at the moment, Battles (not The Battles, as Mr Penpusher annoyingly kept calling them).

The start of the performance caught by surprise. Bassist Dave Konopka, without the other members present, appeared just to be fiddling around, preparing or practising something. Then, all of a sudden, he just turned round and hammered out four bars worth of music.

Konopka stopped playing, but the music continued in a loop. It was a loud, bassy line — the sort that you can feel as much as you can hear. It seemed vaguely familiar, but nothing I could place from Battles’s records. Then he turned round to attend to his magic box. A few button presses later, and all of a sudden the unfamiliar sound was transformed into the very familiar beginning of ‘Race: Out’.

The rest of the band arrived, and we were to be treated to an hour or so of mind-bending music and technology. And the use of technology is quite important, because this is what pushes their unique sound. A simple guitars-and-keyboards band, Battles are not.

Pitchfork seemed to think that their album, Mirrored, is nothing short of revolutionary. Also read their review of Seefeel’s Quique for a comparison of Battles’s mix of guitars and technology to what Seefeel were able to achieve 15 years ago. Battles could not have existed in their current state before today.

It is just as well that they do exist today. Ever since the likes of IDM started to sound a bit stale a few years ago, there has not been much in the way of forward-looking music. It looks as though, right on cue, Battles have come to save the day.

Five or ten years ago, Mirrored would have been one of those studio albums that is impossible to replicate in a live environment. To watch the guitars and Tyondai Braxton’s vocals being electronically manipulated like this in real time is pretty extraordinary. As you may be able to tell, I was as impressed by the technology on display at the gig as much as the music itself.

Indeed, the music itself was a little bit off-colour. Particularly at the start of the set, a few mistakes were being made. Ian Williams in particular seemed more excited by the prospect of jumping around and looking energetic than actually hitting the right key on his keyboard. For a band that is often labelled “math rock”, they seem to delight in being imprecise from time to time.

And this “math rock” band is not just about chin stroking. Infact, particularly on Mirrored, they seem to be almost anti-chin stroking. At times whimsical and humorous, Battles are not afraid to produce an unashamed crowd-pleaser such as ‘Atlas’. And ‘Atlas’ really is a crowd pleaser, with members of the audience singing along to the “whooa-aay-oooh” bit, though they were probably prohibited from singing the rest because of ambiguity as to what the rest of the lyrics actually are.

I suppose the sheer energy is part of what makes Battles awesome live. This is particularly true of their stunning drummer, John Stainer. He clearly has his admirers. One person in the crowd seemed to be there solely to see John Stainer. At one point he just randomly started chanting, “John! John! John! John! John! John! John!” I think in his head the whole crowd was chanting with him.

Unlike Williams, Stainer is so relentlessly dedicated to playing correctly that it almost defies belief. Fast, precise and intricate, it was inevitable that he would start sweating. But I have never seen somebody sweat so much in my life. By the middle of the performance he looked like he had just come out of a swimming pool.

It wasn’t just sweat either. At one point I was unfortunate enough to look up just in time to see a huge string of gob come out of his mouth. I have a feeling that, when I’m old and senile, that will be my best memory of the gig.

I was a little bit annoyed that they didn’t play what I think are the two best tracks on the album, ‘Rainbow’ and ‘Ddiamondd’, but you can’t have it all.

Battles in action: ‘Atlas’ live at Chicago Glass Bottle, 30-03-2007

That full concert (!!) is available on YouTube here.

More Battles awesomeness

• Last.fm event page: Battles at ABC2 on 23 May 2007
• Flickr photoset by Mike Quin: Battles at the ABC
• Battles MySpace
• Battles official website

Melua’s deep sea gig sets record

Singer Katie Melua has entered the record books by playing the world’s deepest underwater concert.

Unfortunately the gig was in an oil rig so she didn’t drown.