LOS ANGELES (Neurot Recordings) -
Battle of Mice Named Number One Independent Album on Decibel Magazine's Top 40 Albums of the Year! The Band's Members of Red Sparowes and Made Out of Babies Pitted Against Each Other Create Ferocious, Beautiful
Music Mixed with Physical Confrontation.
In a year filled with numerous big releases as underground metal gains considerable mainstream acceptance, the Neurot Recordings debut by Battle of Mice is the top ranked independent label release on Decibel Magazine's Top 40 Albums of 2006 (view the full article HERE). The album, A Day of Nights won the Number Two position (Mastodon's major label debut snagging first place), beating out highly-esteemed and critically-praised new albums by Converge, Isis, Mogwai, Boris and even Iron Maiden!
In October, the magazine awarded Battle of Mice an astonishing 10 out of 10 rating in its album review. Meanwhile, CMJ featured the band and writers from Venus to Revolver continue singing the praises of A Day of Nights.
Battle of Mice is an oddly violent and volatile (both musically and personally) collaboration between vocalist Julie Christmas (whose mainstay band, Made Out of Babies also ranked No 31 on the Top 40 Albums of 2006) and guitarist/keyboardist Josh Graham (Red Sparowes, Neurosis visual artist.) The band is rounded out by bassist Tony Maimone (Book of Knots, ex-Pere Ubu) and drummer/producer Joel Hamilton (Book of Knots, Players Club, Glazed Baby.)
"Looking back, I can see that the songs were written in a timeline that mirrors what was happening in our growing, and then rapidly decaying relationship," says Battle of Mice vocalist Julie Christmas. The order in which the songs on the band's debut album, A Day of Nights were tracked reflects this psychological putrefaction: before the album's final song was recorded, a band member reportedly accidentally "fell" down the stairs.
Upon first meeting, Christmas and Red Sparowes guitarist Josh Graham proclaim that an intense antagonism sparked immediately between them when her band Made Out of Babies and his group played together at the South By Southwest Music Festival in 2005. When the two bands embarked on a West Coast tour together later that year, Christmas' and Graham's attitudes toward one another took on a decidedly different hue. A long-distance relationship (Graham in L.A.; Christmas in NYC) ensued, the furious and occasionally harrowing nature of which is reflected in the music of Battle of Mice. "The sonic philosophy of the band reflects a huge, primal range of emotion: Love, lust, jealousy, whiskey, and blind rage," Julie explains. And while it might be pointed out that "whiskey" is not necessarily a clinically-recognized human emotion, it is unlikely that anyone will misunderstand the implications of its inclusion after hearing Battle of Mice.
With the addition of Maimone and Hamilton, Battle of Mice entered Studio G in Brooklyn and recorded seven songs for its Neurot Recordings debut full-length, A Day of Nights. By the time the band finished tracking five of the seven songs, Graham and Christmas' relationship had become a thunderhead of psychic pollution, and the seething tension of the attendant working environment was too much for Maimone to withstand. By the time the sixth song, "Cave of Spleen," was recorded, the pair couldn't bear to be in the same room together. As such, the guitars and vocals were completed on different days; the vocals in one take, with no pre-written lyrics. The result is an album that is alternately hypnotic ("Sleep and Dream") and horrifying (the 911 call at the end of "At the Base of the Giant's Throat," which the group refuses to discuss), enthralling ("Salt Bridge") and epic ("The Lamb and the Labrador").
Thus, A Day of Nights documents the savage trajectory of an interpersonal flameout. It is a litany of ominous overtones and malicious subtext, a catalogue of the poisons that conspire to choke our best intentions; a testament to the inexorable miasma of suspicion and paranoia that creeps, unannounced, into the open spaces between us all. Which isn't to say that beauty and grace cannot be the handmaidens of ugliness and dysfunction: A Day of Nights is nothing if not mesmerizing; a living, breathing monument to the optimistic notion that everything happens for a reason. And despite any unseemly events that may have transpired, there will be more Battle of Mice Records to come.
