Drums & Tuba Battles Ole CD

The big news is Drums & Tuba's return after their three-year break from the studio is filled with vocals, most from drummer Tony Nozero. This is still classic Drums & Tuba -- King Crimson meets beat-filled post-punk with jam band freedom -- with the band a little more focused on groove and angst. In other words, the post-punk aspect is working double time on Battles Olé, with Nozero's Howard Devoto-meets-Richard Butler vocals emphasizing everything '80s and underground about the record. Big difference is few punkers or punk-funkers let the songs stretch out like they do here, and nobody ran a band back then with just tuba, guitar, and drums. After an atmospheric intro, the opening "Two Dollars" thunders and throbs like Liquid Liquid-loving stoner rock while "Four Notes of April" combines funky pipes and pans percussion over a sinister song that's Love and Rockets at their most prog. The epic "Magnum Opie" features all the improvisation and time changes of the old days for a gripping ten minutes, but the crunchy and difficult "If I Die" that follows proves this band isn't one to live in the past or provide safe haven for anyone who comes with expectations. Nozero's vocals are just part of the sonic wash, with Brian Wolff's tuba acting as bass and Neil McKeely's drum still providing the hypnotic rhythms all the swirling notes cling on. As firm rhythms take hold and waves of sound envelope the listener, the quirkiness of the instrumentation disappears even faster than it does when listening to the similarly built Morphine. Hardly contrived and way past clever, with Battles Olé Drums & Tuba have moved well past breaking rules and focus on making hallucinatory music that was meant to be. ~ David Jeffries

Tension. It's a key ingredient in music that strives to be epochal, music that doesn't just tug at your emotions, it bottles them up and carbonates them, gently adding pressure until they explode all over your shirt. It also tends to instigate great art. Battles Olé, Drums & Tuba's third album on Righteous Babe Records, captures the band at its most intense, building impenetrable sonic walls only to smash them to bits like a hyperactive child who has grown tired of his toys. Everyone from Beethoven to Led Zeppelin knew how to maximize dramatic potential. The NYC-based ensemble of drums (Tony Nozero), tuba (Brian Wolff) and guitar (Neal McKeeby) continues in this tradition, giving a clinic on the art of tension and release - which wasn't purely a musical exercise. After a decade of rigorous touring and artistic pressure, the band had hit a wall, and after hearing Nozero's take, it's plain that the tension on Battles Olé is art imitating life. "We were desperately trying to find ourselves musically again. It felt like a final gasp. At so many times during this two-year process, we were reaching places that were very uncomfortable." Despite these trials and tribulations, the band soldiered on, creating a landmark record in the process. Battles Olé features the appearance of an instrument that had been foreign to D&T records - the human voice. On the ambitious opening track, "Two Dollars," Nozero adds his impassioned, Johnny Rotten snarl to a song that is painstakingly built over the course of several minutes. The track slowly grows from a landscape of wispy, robotic noises to a slick, heist-movie groove, gaining momentum with every bar. The vocals just add to this sense of restlessness, until the tension finally explodes, in a volcanic blaze of power chords. This refreshing burst of simplicity sends "Two Dollars" into the stratosphere, lending true significance to Drums & Tuba's mad studio concoctions.With Battles Olé, this self-proclaimed "rock band" has managed to harness its inner turmoil, expanding on the infectiously bizarre formula of its two previous RBR releases, Vinyl Killer (2001) and Mostly Ape (2002). The nuts and bolts are still there: Wolff's guttural, funky tuba lines and soaring trumpet harmonies, McKeeby's acroba