“My year with the wizard was a long one.” So opens the self-titled release from New York‘s Battle Ave, their first for the best part of seven years. The single, aptly titled ‘My Year with the Wizard‘, feels like a subtle nod to this gap. Not so much in that it references the break (it doesn’t), or offers a simple explanation, but rather how the cryptic lyrics describe our curious habit of sorting life into periods. The year with the wizard and its absent friends. The year with the devil and its sadness. The one with the lovers and the curses it carries with it. Times marked by fixations, preoccupations, peculiar troubles which colour all else around them. Periods seemingly endless until suddenly they’re in the rear-view. The next such time already likely approaching, life moving on.
Battle Ave feels true to this experience. Though serving as something of a reintroduction for those listeners who fell for 2015’s Year of Nod, the release is not a considered engagement with the hiatus. Rather, Jesse Doherty and co. give us five varied tracks that highlight the range of their style. Each is its own snapshot of a distinct period, focused on nothing but the work at hand. Just how Battle Ave sounded at this time or that, what they could sound like moving forward.
After the taut rhythm of ‘My Year with the Wizard’, which as we described in a preview lands “somewhere between playful and menacing [with] an oddly hypnotic air,” second single ‘Fear Of’ offers a richer, country-inflected style. A wistful flow through which Doherty’s vocals emerge hushed and cautious. The spacious instrumental ‘Kingston South Cuties’ takes this mood further, pushing towards an almost Yo La Tengo-esque nostalgia, while ‘Cell’ pivots into dense intensity. With a skittering, pattered rhythm driven by a deep momentum, the drums whip themselves up into a concentrated mass, Doherty’s vocals surfacing through the thicket as though from a tired, overwhelmed mind.
Closer ‘There Can’t Be Love’ switches things up once again, and marks the return of a Battle Ave speciality. Year of Nod displayed a talent for building long and winding tracks, with songs like ‘Lalande’ and ‘Zoa’ breaking traditional structures with both invention and patience, and the new example is a lesson in the form. Built upon ethereal ambient foundations, the song gives itself time and space to follow its convictions, ebbing and flowing with intuitive rhythm. Importantly, as with all of Battle Ave’s longer works, the length feels inherent to the sound. This is not a traditional song couched by an extended intro or self-indulgent close, but its own animal that grows and dips and drops out altogether.
The latter is the centrepiece of the track, a moment of silence that feels like an end, but just before it settles a scratched guitar draws Doherty back in. He sings tentatively, placing a word at a time and following the spirit that emerges. The effect is both reflective and very much within the present moment. An opportunity perhaps to recognise the passing periods of life. The years with devils and wizards and lovers. The fact that nothing ends within any one moment, and there will always be another.
We were lucky enough to ask Jesse a few questions, so read on below to dig a little deeper into the release.
Thanks so much for speaking with us. How does it feel to be back and releasing new music into the world?
Thanks for the interest <3 Finally releasing music again feels very weird! I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with my own music. Sometimes I just want to mix these songs eternally, tinkering and never actually showing anyone, so releasing is always a bit stressful. That being said, I was the class clown in school… the spotlight always feels nice.
It feels important the EP is self-titled, especially in light of the relatively long gap between this and Year of Nod. Do you see the EP as a reintroduction? A fresh start? A statement that you are very much still alive?
Yeah, it’s been seven years, give or take, since we released anything substantial. I think part of the eponymous title is exactly that—a new beginning, or a dusting off. But I also think of this EP as being closer to a mixtape or a compilation. These songs were not written or recorded with this release in mind, and the approaches we took for each of these songs really fall all over the spectrum of our shared influences. I guess it’s self-titled because it’s meant to be akin to a primer or a “get-to-know-us” release.
You’ve described the recording process as “like a game of Exquisite Corpse,” with an element of surprise as the various elements are passed between the members of the band. Was this a life/pandemic-induced change from your usual method, or has it always been baked into the Battle Ave style?
This was definitely a new process, one that was both situational and experimental. During the early part of the lockdown, our drummer Samantha set up a remote songwriting group; her idea was that one person would contribute a musical idea and then it would go down the line, with every subsequent person adding something new to it. I definitely followed her lead and used this songwriting approach for a few of the tracks on the EP (I think the lopsided, left-field quality of this process is best heard on “Fear Of”) but this is the total opposite of how I normally write. Usually, I will have just about every part written out in my head before I ever bring a song to the band.
One thing that’s always struck me about the Battle Ave sound is its willingness to play with structure and length. You might put a two-minute track between a pair exceeding seven minutes, with neither feeling undercooked or overdone. How do you know when a song is ready, so to speak? What decides if the original idea becomes a succinct little spark or some winding behemoth?
It’s always a gut reaction for me. The song either feels incomplete and lacking or it feels like I’ve found an organic ending point. I’m a high school English teacher, and a lot of my time out of class is spent reading student essays. I feel like evaluating my own songs feels similar to evaluating someone’s writing; it’s the same feeling you get when you read a sentence that is grammatical, but still feels off. I make myself rework my songs much in the same way I ask them to clarify, rephrase, expand upon, refocus their writing when it doesn’t sit right.
Most songs usually take a few years for me to complete, often because I’ll lose steam trying to figure out what needs to happen next and won’t come back to it for a while. I’ve always gravitated towards longer forms, and it’s only recently that I’ve been really happy writing shorter songs with more traditional organization.
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I was struck by a line in your bio, written by the wonderful Sammy Maine, which describes your sound as a “wizened throwback to various beloved cult catalogues,” but one which “manages to shake off any nostalgic fog and avoid anachronism by employing a detailed focus on the here and now.” Could you speak a little on your influences, and any attempts to follow and/or subvert their work?
I love that line, because wizened means ‘shrivelled and wrinkled with age’—not sure if that’s what Sammy meant to say, but I think it feels appropriate, since most of us in the band are curmudgeons who are preoccupied with getting older.
I’m pretty unabashed about how much influence I get from other musicians. Before the songs have names, I’ll sometimes label them based on who I was listening to when I started writing them—”the Alex G song,” “the Talk Talk song,” “the Judee Sill song.” When I formed the band with Samantha it was with the definitive goal of “making something that sounds like Pavement.” I never really try to subvert the artists I’m inspired by, but my musical instincts are my own, my voice is my own, the instincts of the band members are really distinctive, and so just by dint of these factors our songs never end up really sounding like the songs or artists that helped spawn them.
I wondered if we could dig a little deeper into the final words of the release. “There can’t be love in everything.” It captures something of the EP as a whole. The sense of making peace with never making peace?
I remember coming up with that line while sitting in traffic in NYC. I really love the move Bill Callahan makes in “Too Many Birds,” where he uncovers this beautiful line one word at a time (“If you could only stop your heart beat for one heart beat”). I wanted to do something similar, and I’d had this snippet of a melody sitting in my head for years, and it just fit perfectly. I ended up building the whole song around it.
When I was compiling songs for the release, I wasn’t really trying to create anything with a coherent emotional through-line; I was just using songs that didn’t really fit anywhere else. Interestingly, I do think that there are some shared themes that come out when you take the piece as a whole; there’s a focus on tenderness and being kind to yourself, and on letting things go. When I wrote that lyric, I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, but after sitting with the song for a while, it really does feel like I’m telling myself that it’s okay to fail. Nobody’s meant to succeed at everything, and that’s fine.
Battle Ave is out now and you can get it from Bandcamp, where you can pick up the previous releases too, as well as all the usual places.
Photos by Molly Doherty, album art by Gabriel Chalfin-Piney with lettering by Mike Brown