It’s surprising that things take so long sometimes. We’d expected a raft of mini Bloc Parties long ago, it’s been nearly 2 years since ‘Silent Alarm’ lodged its legend as one of this decade’s most enduring debuts and yet it still remains largely unplundered, wholesale anyway. Battle, when we first caught wind of them, seemed like the first – only a sweet fresh-faced version thereof, which didn’t quite work. Cute, we’d imagine, wasn’t what they were aiming for. So this, then, is surprising too. Because this, their debut seven track mini-album, comes through as an significantly strong, clamped-fast rack of songs with their roots in the paranoid, shrapnel-scarred disco hubris of Bloc Party but with a much wider, perhaps much more accessible, reach.
Nearly every song on here registers a flag planted for the mother ship, mainly for the jabbing, unforgiving mechanics of the rhythm section that rarely lets up. Yet step back and there is much a wider picture to take in. They remind most completely of vastly underrated dry-ice 80s epic revivalists The Open, and with that we’re talking Echo & The Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, The Cure. Frontman Jason Bavanandan has a large, sweeping pop vocal too, with the morose, dramatic edge of Scott Walker, and absolutely makes the most of it. Unlike The Open though they haven’t drowned amid their own art and there is plenty to get a hold of here.
‘Wicked Owl’ opens the album with a welter of springy riffs, flexing beats, twinkling delay and then a massed expanse of minimal gathering piano used as a springboard into the grand emotion of early U2. ‘Tendency’ doesn’t miss a beat, ratting through The Cure’s earliest shapes and utilising Kele Okereke’s vocal stylisings (“come over come over come over, here…”). ‘One More Night’ almost has the discipline of British Sea Power and echoes their tendency for bright ringing lead guitar lines, always doing just enough, never too much. ‘I Never Stopped’ throws even more Bloc Party into that mix, vocal structure through to scathing attention-seeking licks that stop you dead, but it is by now strong enough not to collapse under the weight.