Battles

Juice B Crypts

The most cohesive start-to-finish listening experience in the band’s career, Juice B Crypts sees Williams and Stanier balancing with great poise on the line between the noodle-y experimentation Battles are known for and the songcraft they had scratched at the edges of—but never quite fully achieved—on previous records.

Though it's a relatively concise 40 minutes, Battles pack so much into Juice B Crypts that, perhaps more than any of their albums since Mirrored, it needs to be taken as a whole to appreciate its constantly changing, consistently engaging sounds.

It’s not always been obvious, but since their inception in 2002, Battles have been on an almighty quest for the funk. Definitive, all-conquering, funk. On ‘Juice B Crypts’, their fourth studio album, they might just have found it.

Juice B Crypts is an uncompromised, multi-faceted assault course for the brain, but one you won’t regret taking.

It would be hard to find an album to compete with theirs in regards of modernism or creativeness.

The end product is the giddily unrestrained Juice B Crypts, an LP both fast in terms of tempo and run time and fastidious when it comes to its construction

Battles' music continues to be unconventional and sometimes harsh-sounding, but they also have an ear for catchy melodies.

Battles’ music often sounds more android than human, like they’re anthropomorphised, misbehaving robots running amok in a futuristic music shop.

Juice B Crypts occasionally threatens to collapse beneath the weight of its overstuffed songs. But even when it’s too maximalist for its own good, Battles’s music is still compelling.

Captivating tidbits rattle inside each of these 11 tracks, thrilling details that, when found, hit like syringes of adrenaline.

Juice B Crypts often feels like it’s treading water, a band making busywork out of something that still has the potential to excite.