(Photo "The Cute Fanboys Lack Focus" by Ben Rosenberg)

Battles at Slim's
Better than: The AP Calculus exam

I've never been good at pretending to be important, so I wasn't quite sure what to do last night at the Slim's will-call window. The long-awaited Battles set had just started, the show was totally sold out, and my boyfriend/photographer Ben was not on the list where he was supposed to be. What to do? Being a stand-by-your-man/photographer kinda girl, I couldn't leave him out on the cold SOMA streets alone. Yelling at the ticket girl wouldn't have helped, since it was a publicist in New York who screwed up, and I never yell at people anyway. So I did what I always do when I get aggravated: make fun of someone else. "Hello, sweet dude," I said as a stout bridge'n'tunnel type with awful slicked-back hair approached the ticket window. "Yeah, that's Mike Patton," Ben said. And not a moment too soon! Slim's house manager appeared to whisk Patton through the back doors, and we were able to talk her into letting us buy another ticket.

Their house manager's courteousness notwithstanding, Slim's is a shitty place to see a show, especially a sold-out show, and especially when you're already annoyed. The sound is muddled and too quiet due to improper speaker placement, and three unfortunate columns in front of the stage impede the view from pretty much everywhere in the house. We climbed the balcony stairs, took a deep breath, and started enjoying ourselves immediately.

We were just in time for "Atlas," the powerhouse first single off Battles' Warp debut Mirrored (awesome video here). Singer/keyboardist Tyondai Braxton lead the curiously unenthusiastic crowd in clapping along to the opening bars, the effect being indistinguishable from the "Na naa, na-na, HEY! Na-na na-na" routine the crowd does at basketball games. Braxton is a fascinating frontman: he makes fey hand gestures, crouches down into himself like someone just punched him in the gut, and computer-processes his voice into a little-girl singsong (on "Atlas" anyway), and he still comes off totally tough.

A Battles song is like a Petri dish squirming with wildly different and complexly dorky organisms. Between the Ph.D-level music theory of ex-Helmet John Stanier's drumming, the proggy interplay between Braxton's and Ian William's keyboards, the mysterious laptop wizardry, the fact that there are frequently four dudes playing six instruments, and the general math rock/jam band vibe, Battles could come off as some exquistite wankery. Their songs never feel aimless or solipsistic though; Battles certainly doesn't care if you can keep track of the 3/4 and 4/4 time signatures layered over alternating 5/4 and 7/4 drum beats, or even if you're aware that they're math geniuses. "Generous wanking," I call it – these guys are nerding out for their pleasure and ours (unlike the last wankers I saw at Slim's, Built to Spill, who guiltar-noodled me right out of the venue, clawing my face in boredom, after about four songs). --Frances Reade