What a trash heap this EP is. For a long time, I supported the idea of Battles. I supported them getting notoriety. I supported their creative endeavors and felt that they would put out a truly tremendous work in due time. Ever since the group was announced, ever since they released their impressive and sometimes questionable EP's on Dim Mak, I was into the idea of Battles being a force to be reckoned with. Unfortunately they decided to make Mirrored, fucking up any sort of interest they potentially could have had. The entire album reeked of bored, creative musicians expounding on terrible ideas, the sort of ideas you'd scrap if you had a single drive narrative and an ultimate purpose. Yes I know Mirrored is praised like no tomorrow, but in typical fashion the amount of people who can't distinguish between intensely focused music that sounds loose and sprawling, and between those sorts of albums that are bloated carcasses of listless musical banality that exist solely by happenstance, has reached critical mass.

Enough about Mirrored though. You might be happy to know that the title track holds up far better when it's isolated on this release than it exists on Mirrored. Still, I don't think it's that great. The irony of making a song called Tonto that has terribly unfunny tinge of native american music structure (complete with oh-so-apt chanting) makes me lose any sort of respect I might have had for the song. Spare me the 'you just don't have a sense of humor' comment too, as it's really no different than making an idiotic song about a Barnyard. They could have called it The Barnyard Song and it would have been equally humorless and musically dull, yet somehow not out of place.

The remixes are also aggravating. The Field shows everyone how much of a one trick pony he is by making a song that literally sounds like he just threw Tonto into 'The Field Template' on Ableton Live. You got your 'da-da-daa' trance lines, weak minimal beats, etc. etc. etc. Christ I don't even want to talk about the rest of the EP. I'm not sure why people still ask Four Tet to remix things, as far as I'm aware he's never really been that good at it (though his remix here is fairly decent). Throw in a few live performances (and despite my negativity I hear their live show is fantastic), another remix by some DJ I have no clue about, along with a number of video's...It's a strange and ultimately haphazard collection of tracks and videos that don't hold up well at all. It just proves to me how indecisive and unfocused these guys are, and how much their music suffers as a result.

I was feeling rather jaded about music made by "bands" for a long time before... well this year basically, when a slew of really interesting acts caressed and assaulted my ears in ways which were pretty unexpected. Battles is foremost of those bands (at the moment) and this release was my introduction to them. Well, in actual fact the video to Tonto was my introduction, and after seeing that a couple of times on the TV I was convinced I needed this release, and boy was I not disappointed! I really like the remixes, but for me the original is supreme on this release. The mutating metre and development of Tonto is engaging throughout the whole of the piece. I remember at first listen I thought at the intro "oh more wanky Indie guitars", but this sentiment was very short lived as the whole of the track revealed itself to me like a musical strip-tease. Fantastic. I was especially interested to see what was behind the video for Tonto, which really appeals to me with its stark presentation and setting. Grab this!