Originally appeared in BeatRoute Magazine. 

Movie buffs can remember the mortared fields of battle when The Life Aquatic hit theatres. Generally enraptured after The Royal Tenenbaums, the critical community felt slighted at the new work, and deemed it a slight work. As if shaking themselves from a dream, half called Anderson a hack, and the other half defended him as rigorously. Those battle lines exist today, weakened by the triumph of The Darjeeling Limited, and bolstered again by the snark surrounding The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

With Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson’s latest, I feel like the naysayers will reach a Waterloo of sorts. An appropriately precious story about two disaffected youngsters on the edge of puberty fleeing their obligations to make physical their pen-pal relationship, the film is almost a spiritual prequel to The Royal Tenenbaums. Containing the same fetishes for precocious young women that inspire deep change in men and the trappings of a Rockwell ‘60s nuclear family ideal (that may have never existed at all), Moonrise might as well be the story of Margot Tenenbaum’s first love.

When Sam (Jared Gilman) runs away from summer camp on an Eastern Seaboard island, and Suzy (Kara Hayward) likewise jets from her suffocating family, it kicks off a game of cat and mouse between the pair and the authority figures in their lives who launch a manhunt. Sam’s scout master (Edward Norton), the local sheriff (Bruce Willis) and Suzy’s parents (Frances McDormand and Bill Murray) have subplots running through Moonrise Kingdom, but the main attraction is pure John Hughes territory. It’s Sixteen Candles through the Anderson lens, and it works beautifully.

Where Fantastic Mr. Fox was criticized for being dialing “Anderson-isms” up to 11 — the long pan shots, meticulous mise en scene, and deadpan dialogue — Moonrise again reveals those idiosyncrasies in Anderson’s style to be deeply effective. It is simply one of the most stunningly shot films in recent memory, with the dense, virgin, rainforest-like locale of Suzy and Sam’s outing serving up some of the best nature appreciation on film this side of David Attenborough. It’s a technical marvel, to be sure, but Anderson is at his best directing his most sincere love story to date.

Suzy and Sam’s romance is deeply rooted in the short prologue to The Darjeeling Limited, Hotel Chevalier. The short film visits a problematic Paris tryst between Jason Swartzman and Natalie Portman. The attention paid to short, pithy lines of dialogue pregnant with capital ‘M’ meaning is on full display in Moonrise Kingdom. The difference here is a lack of anger or cynicism, and a great deal more fumbling in the dark.

Suzy and Sam are the young love ideal — blind, sincere, and honest. Suzy hauls around a suitcase full of science-fiction and fantasy, her escapes from a life she detests. She expresses the desire to be an orphan, just like Sam, because it sounds more interesting, and all her heroines are orphans. “I love you,” Sam says to this, “but you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Their exploration of each other is as deeply male as it is deeply felt, and it never falls into the saccharine. It’s a balancing act Anderson navigates expertly.

Anderson is clearly in love with the idea of the early ‘60s, but his version of the age is the Mad Men version, the version that will likely send Sam to Vietnam and Suzy to Kent State. Nostalgia doesn’t cover or apologize for the problems and flaws in Moonrise Kingdom. Nothing is idyllic, save for Sam and Suzy, alone in the woods, constantly hunted. It’s a stirring, unapologetic tale of young love, and might prove to be Anderson’s crowning work.

Originally appeared in Discorder Magazine

Go do the Pepsi Challenge with the Mother Mother discography and you’re going to taste two distinctly different bands. Their debut record, Touch Up, is a justifiably lauded alt-folk masterpiece, and by the time “Legs Away” starts playing, Mother Mother has cemented themselves as something other, and exciting. It’s perhaps not puzzling, like a hippie trading rope sandals for wing tips when baby makes three, that they would trade that uncanny quality for something more widely palatable. Not puzzling, but a shame nonetheless.

This might sound like lame nostalgia on the occasion of the latest Mother Mother release, The Sticks, but that nostalgia runs a hard path through all of their subsequent releases. I wouldn’t even have new listeners go back to Touch Up to see what the band could do with an acoustic guitar, some stilted lyrics, and a three part harmony. Ignorance is bliss, and O My Heart et al are much more enjoyable not knowing what was, and not wanting to shake the band by its collective shoulders and ask them to disregard Emily Haines and just be themselves, dammit.

But that’s flawed. The identity of a band is rooted in the present, and by that principle this Mother Mother is more calculated and aerodynamic at the expense of weird. The Sticks is such that a live set including Touch Up in any way would seem like pockmarks on a white porcelain surface.

“Let’s Fall In Love” is probably the most accurate thesis statement on the record, a power pop piece with no power. It’s an earwig, to be sure, and one sure to be hummed through the year, but it’s safe. And not just seatbelt safe, but full racing harness safe. Water wings safe. “Businessman” and “Happy” continue the trend, all but screaming a query: Where did the energy go? We know multi-album deals are a wet blanket on creativity , but The Sticks could stand to generate some friction and heat.

There’s no offense here, but I doubt the critical clairvoyants could have predicted unmemorable outings from Mother Mother. Here we are, ankle deep.

On “Verbatim”, frontman Ryan Guldemond had the verve to call himself “the rooster in the morning and the cock of the day”. The Sticks is a kind of bird too, but it’s more like a sleepy seagull at night, belly full of yesterday’s scraps.

Living obese is like a couple of ambulances screeching by, sirens on fire. Those ambulances don’t affect you presently, but knowing that their rush is to tend to multiple casualties brings that passive foreboding, that palpable feeling that something has gone quite wrong. Like any prolonged health problem, the foreboding doesn’t really catch up to you until that ambulance is ordered on your behalf.

This is where my conflict comes in reading Ljudmila Petrovic’s article recently published in The Peak [“Fat happiness: Is it wrong to be fat?”, February 20]. That article focused on Kalamity Hildebrandt, a sufferer of the slings and arrows of a culture that values a human life so long as the body containing it fits certain parameters. While it is undeniable that the psychological damage conquered by Hildebrandt far eclipses my own, I know a thing or two about the receiving end of one of the last casual discriminations sponsored by people today. Her conviction and dedication to what she calls “fat politics”, however, is something I cannot identify with, as it would be an act of hypocrisy as I do everything I can to exit their ranks. It’s a hypocrisy that could well enhance the lives of those that embrace it.

As universal equality marches forward, the normal start to squirm a bit. When women got the vote, when the slaves were freed, and when civil rights was racing into existence, it’s not a stretch to imagine the psychological state of the previously “normal”, the people (invariably white men) who just had their superiority dismantled. “Who am I better than now?” was surely a common topic of inward conversation. With a new lack of socially acceptable targets comes the search for green pastures.

Luckily, nobody really sweats about coming down on fat people. Make a crack or disparagement about a person of colour, creed, or sex in mixed company and chances are that somebody is going to say something, or at least feel some righteous indignation. Not with fat people. Fat people are guiltless fodder, even for other fat people. Everybody likes feeling superior, and the fat have that nice padding to insulate them from feelings.

This is the social fabric that led to the vilification of the uncanny that Hildebrandt and I experienced in our earliest years. Her parents deviated from mine, in that mine figured a growth spurt and active adolescence would sort things out. Hers decided diet pills were the answer, putting them in league with her tormentors. This is second only to an acquaintance of mine whose parents looked the other way on a nasty cocaine habit because it made her skinny, and my heart feels for both of them. My heart sympathizes for that special moment, too, where the lion’s share of verbal and overt discrimination gives way to a quiet preference that never includes us, with that cutting “no fat chicks” adage that isn’t as gender specific as it looks. My heart is with these women, and everyone that dealt with fat discrimination in youth. But where in my heart is my brain?

My brain can’t subscribe. It is, in fact, a little chapped at the insinuation that there is a civil rights argument to be made for fat people like myself (“like myself”, a chorus that will run through this as I attempt to bait authority, a pudgy Richard Pryor standing in judgement of his own). Far be it for me to paint myself as a temporarily embarrassed skinny person, but I can’t put myself in a political struggle that co-opts the language and struggle of women and other minorities. Because the truth is, fat politics is consolation for a population with more in common with cigarette smokers fighting prohibition laws than with any suffrage movement.

Fat politics is consolation for a population with more in common with cigarette smokers fighting prohibition laws than with any suffrage movement.

Hildebrandt points to the unfair language of “epidemic”, describing the rise in obesity as troubling but gradual, not explosive. Similarly, the language adopted by Dr. Scott Lear, the much repeated refrain of “giv[ing] people the education and the tools with which they can make healthy life choices,” are fingers shoved in the ears of the overweight to drown out the klaxons of their own hastened mortality. Soft-pedalling the danger of obesity with a semantic argument or politicizing the lack of basic nutritional common sense is excuse-making of the highest order.

I’m not a fat person because of a lack of nutritional knowledge. I know constant snacking and large meals will keep me overweight. It’s not my mother’s fault I asked for seconds and her kindness granted it. It is the ingrained personality of the glutton, one alive and well in me. Even as I make the first real, successful strides of my life to exit the world of the fat, that gluttony is there, a drooling devil on my shoulder, trying to convince me that the pleasure felt by . . . anything, really, can’t last and can’t be repeated.

That thought pattern created the Super Size at McDonalds; have pleasure now because it might not happen later, damn the consequences and the logic. It’s an adorable lack of self-confidence in your ability to create pleasure at a later date. If it’s available now, eat it all. Where is the instant gratification of moderation?

While that same gluttony under control has served me well in other areas of my life (that hunger translates rather nicely into the areas of knowledge and relationships), it highlights the main difference between a fat person and an actual oppressed group: there are immediate health benefits to exiting the demographic.

There are citations to be made about the health risk factors of being in a recognized minority or group traditionally thought of as oppressed, but your risk of heart attack doesn’t plummet if you just stop being gay, an impossibility in itself. You can’t stop being a person of colour, and if you could, your cholesterol wouldn’t hit the skids if you did. You can, however, ‘stop’ being fat, and the benefits to doing so are many.

The carrying of excess weight is a documented, obvious health risk. To argue against the “medicalization” of the language surrounding the condition borders on delusional. The medicalization of obesity exists because it is a medical problem. To say otherwise is to fly in the face of decades of medical science, and is shockingly irresponsible.

Buy a sandwich. Not a hamburger, and not with a bunch of bacon on it. Some lean meat and a bunch of vegetables. Eat half. Throw the other half away. Do this for every meal for six months. You just lost weight. It’s not your glands, and it’s not your metabolism. It’s not medicalized to the point of shame, and it’s not conforming to what GQ has decided is the ideal man. It is a good caloric intake, and it’s putting yourself in a position to not die early, and to not spend those twilight years on a Rascal, beeping a horn at the able-bodied to accommodate your useless knees. It’s a person I don’t want to be, and that I refuse to be. So I throw that half a sandwich in the garbage because that moment of gratification isn’t worth years of disability, poor health, and being a strain on our system of medicine.

The first pieces I wrote for The Peak were part of a column called “Big man on campus”. They were a humour-filled look at the life and trials of fat people in a culture where a visible ribcage that can be played like a xylophone is a desirable trait. The pain of being ‘other’, and the pain of being ‘normal’ wasn’t lost on me then. It wasn’t lost on me when my parents were having conversations about whether they would be the ones planning my funeral. And it’s not lost on me that a brave section of our kind have decided to reject expectations and love themselves. It’s beyond commendable, and something I struggle with every day. But the rhetoric that placates the voices in their heads and the voices in the heads of others that suggests the health risk is minimal has to be nipped in the bud with as much prejudice as the voices that would keep us down and scared and ugly.

You can change a lot of things pretty easily. The identity of a neighbourhood is not one of them.

For example, in my own head, I can change the entire meaning of a song with an errant mental comma. If I take the first line from Wilco’s “Jesus Etc” (Jesus don’t cry/You can rely on me honey/You can combine anything you want) and put a comma after the word “Jesus”, the entire tone of the song changes from the placation of a messiah to the frustrated kvetching of a boyfriend ill-equipped to handle the anger of a jilted significant other. If you imagine that comma, you alter the identity of a song, but that doesn’t make it the definitive version, no matter how satisfying the change.

The Hastings North Business Improvement Association (HNBIA) recently decided to do a little housekeeping as far as neighbourhood naming goes, and their changes go far beyond a little comma usage. With the help of absolutely no community consultation or mandate from city hall (who has its own Naming Committee that seems to mirror the lack of action of our municipal government as a whole), HNBIA made the unilateral decision to change the name of an entire neighbourhood. Hastings-Sunrise will now be called The East Village, and if you don’t like it, you can suck a lemon.

Without arguing about the crushing pathos of aping a recognizable part of New York City (though some would argue a majority of the music coverage in this very magazine is dedicated to that very act), it’s a little sinister that an association of retailers and businesses can have that kind of power over an area’s identity. Surely these businesses add to the colour and texture of the neighbourhood, but taking their livelihood from the area cannot be more important than the people who simply live out their lives there.

The new materials for The East Village describe it as a “vintage neighbourhood with a progressive attitude”, but who imbues the area with those delicious buzzwords? Communications graduates to be sure, but even if those were objective characteristics of Hastings Village East Sunrise or whatever the hell it’s called these days, it wouldn’t be the sushi restaurants and Mobilicity franchises that make it as appealing as it has become.

It’s a cynical marketing ploy that has pulled the carpet out from under the neighborhood’s residents. While we here at BeatRoute are pleased as punch to be the first magazine in the brand new East Village, I’m flabbergasted that this change seemed to come out of nowhere.

I get that an endless consultation process is incompatible with the marketing aims of area merchants, but the HNBIA either made no overtures to discuss the changes, or they were so invisible as to elude a notice in the mailbox of our office, located right at Nanaimo and Hastings, the heart of their new neighbourhood. Not very neighbourly.

And we got off relatively easy. There’s now a section of Kingsway called Little Saigon, a wonderfully racial slice of idiocy that makes The East Village look like Coke Classic. A nebulous little region by Tinseltown (another failed experiment in modern Vancouver renaming) is now called Crosstown, and the poorest postal code in Canada has dropped the moniker Downtown East Side and has become the lovely Hastings Crossing.

While I’m happy for the developers that now get to pitch new condo buildings like they won’t be built on former drug corners, that name represents a sweeping under the rug of epic proportions. That association of businesses can’t convince anybody to give a shit about people living on the street, so they’ll gentrify it all away in a soothing mist of social media engagement and marketing smoke and mirrors. It will be like a Fresca commercial except inSite will lose their lease to an Urban Outfitters.

The East Village is a fine name for a community, a fact New York City has known for years. But the contempt shown for the input of the proles by the HNBIA is staggering. They’ve staked a claim and emblazoned it with their standard. They’re the lords and we’re merely tenant farmers in The East Village. We live here (or, more accurately, rent overpriced basement suites here), but we’re secondary to the economic output of the Hastings corridor. If that isn’t a bluegrass-worthy sign of the times, I don’t know what is.

Originally appeared in BeatRoute Magazine.

I would compare Michael Dowse’s hockey epic Goon to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, but that might earn me a deserved punch in the face. On the surface, Goon is the likely heir to a throne left vacant by Slapshot, one that has resisted succession by saccharine feel-good hockey movies and Mighty Ducks-clones. But, like all of Dowse’s work, there’s a lot of heart and thought bubbling under the surface.

Goon is the story of Doug Glatt (Sean William Scott), a brawler who gets the attention of a hockey coach with a muscle problem. The toughness Glatt brings to the roster gets him notice from a Halifax farm team where Glatt is assigned to protect a former wunderkind they want back in the big leagues. Along the way he gets his ass kicked a bunch, and meets a nice lady.

Many people will watch Goon and just see that — a simplistic fighting and hockey with some half-hearted jokes thrown in for good measure. But Dowse is not a dumb as the Goon his movie focuses on. The director has made a career out of making films about dumb people, and he always manages to find a deep humanity in them. He’s got it down to a science by now, and loves his characters in an infectious way.

Fubar and its sequel are much loved for their catch-phrases and quotidian aspects, but nobody denies the thumping heart at the core of those films. Dowse’s crowning work so far, the excellent It’s All Gone Pete Tong, followed a similarly pitiable figure, but was never a mean-spirited work. As it was with these films, it is with Goon.

As played by Scott, Doug Glatt is nearly non-functionally stupid. His stupidity is pounded home with every opportunity, but so is his unflappable kindness, a feat through the judicious pummelings. This is where Dostoyevsky comes in, his idiot reflected nicely in Glatt. Through that stupidity, he’s implied to know some deeper truth about what it means to be a good person. Unadulterated by ego, Glatt just wants to protect his teammates, and if that means breaking a few deserving teeth, so be it. Mike Leigh covered similar ground in the excellent Happy-Go-Lucky, but the people who see Glatt’s kindness as a weakness are usually beating the hell out of him instead of just being rude and dismissive.

Though that team spirit and thick-headed dedication to the protection of his teammates is portrayed as a simple nobility, Dowse doesn’t give the violence of sports, or the glorification of the fighting that makes hockey unique, a free pass. While the idea of a less-than intelligent white man fighting to protect his team-mates is about as hawkish as it gets, Dowse puts the action set-piece experience he gained from Pete Tong’s Ibiza club scenes to good use in examining the brutality of the sport. Bruises last, bones are broken, body parts are busted and slashed and cut to no real end with gripping realism and fidelity.

Slapshot made the violence of hockey a punchline, but Goon opts to make it a noble farce, something undertaken for reasons that don’t withstand scrutiny. Some might call the film a critical allegory of Bush Doctrine foreign policy, but they’re probably just hosers.

Originally appeared in The Peak. 

You can’t feel it, but I’m trying to light you on fire with my eyes. I want to hate you to death. I’ve stopped listening to anything the professor is saying and I am trying to awaken in me the power of Greyskull, my X-Gene, or that weird kid from The Omen, and I’m trying to make you combust a little. Not a full body burn or anything (I’m not a weirdo), but just enough to cause you enough discomfort to leave, and maybe take your friends with you so I can listen to the aging hippie trying to pound some book learnin’ far enough into my skull so that I can get out of this place and leave you to pat the hair flames out. I don’t hate you. You just don’t give a shit, and we both know it.

And it’s not totally your fault. You probably shouldn’t be here. You obviously aren’t a scholar, because a scholar would revel in the opportunity to soak in some quality knowledge, even if they were being coerced into a breadth or writing course by an overzealous university desperate for its ‘comprehensive’ crown. So instead you lean over and have a laugh with your friend, in distracting whispers in a small room and full-on conversations in a major lecture theatre. But I understand. The value of a degree is far inflated and you might just be here because it’s the new price of admission to life. I get it. But please, please shut up.

I don’t trust profs to mete out the kind of medieval justice I am looking for.

A professor once commended the summer class I was in because we restrained ourselves from watching funny videos on the Internet while he was trying to lecture. I laughed before I saw that he was deadly serious. It was at this moment that a striking injustice for our current system of professor feedback. We, with no knowledge of what makes a good professor outside our own subjective ideas of what makes a good educator, grade them and affect their careers every semester. We also get grades from them, but that grade is on our work as academics. There is usually some participation grade, but how often does it make a difference past your second year? And besides, I don’t trust them to mete out the kind of medieval justice I’m looking for.

I want to grade you.

Hear me out on this. We all know academic probation is a thing, and we all know that acts of plagiarism and moral turpitude can get you chucked out of any institution if you try hard enough. But the more insidious disease at this school and schools everywhere is people impeding the education of others. It was cute in high school, but now you are taking money out of my pocket with every word you whisper out of your jerk mouth into the jerk ear of your jerk friend who is a jerk. So I want to grade you. When you take my money and my time away from my studies, I want to give you a point. I’m not special (though you think you are), so there is likely a radius of like-minded humans imagining unpleasant things happening to you in their heart of hearts, so they can give you a point too. Now, a single off day inspiring a single lecture full of angry yuppies can’t get you in much trouble, but pretty soon a pattern is going to emerge.

And then you get expelled.

Yep. We’ve become too soft in our scholarly institutions. Rigor went out the door the second tenure became something dependant on the opinions of the student body. So we students are taking matters into our own hands. If you get too many points, you’re out the door. If you can inspire enough people to convince a posse of real human beings and peers and maybe some sort of board reviewing all the points you’ve accrued to chuck you out, you obviously didn’t have your head down low enough to be studying with any real effort. So you’re gone. Go someplace else. Away with you, and giggle no more.

Please, please shut up. You are taking money out of my pockey everytime you open your jerk mouth.

You’re thinking about the practicalities of this system, how the names of the future dead (to us as a school, not actually dead) would be known to their would-be detractors, or how such a system could beat personal vendettas or organized lynchings or what have you. Good, that’s a good brain to have in your head. I bet you shut up in lecture. But if Yelp can develop a good system for the world to come together to rate the local noodle hut, the greatest minds in academia can come up with a system to make sure that those who weren’t raised at home don’t take out their parental shortcomings on the rest of us.

So next time you’re trawling English 101 for that ‘W’ credit you need, or just have no idea what you’re doing in college, don’t lean over to the person next to you to have a chat about how the major you chose won’t make you any money. Just leave. Go look at pretty girls or eat a bagel. Just leave me to my studies so I don’t have to hate you so hard I start devising peer review systems to throw you out of school.

Originally appeared in The Peak. 

On a continent where some of the most popular shows are about a dying drug dealer forced by desperation into life of crime or the worst people in the world running the worst bar in the world, or a competition to be alone and rich on an island somewhere, it’s understandable that we’re a bit cynical. Indeed, it’s no wonder that in the land of Breaking Bad, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,and Survivor that a ferociously optimistic television show about an alien adventurer can’t break very far into the mainstream. Of course I’m talking about Doctor Who.

Doctor Who is a BBC series that has been running since 1963 about an alien with a time machine, wandering and running in search of a good time. That is until danger rears its head and The Doctor has to leap into action with his human companions and giant brain to avert disaster. It’s a kind of Golden Age comic book premise that’s just too sickly sweet for a North American television audience weaned into modernity on homicide procedurals and sadness. It’s that aversion to even the hint of optimism in the genetics of a show that is depriving audiences here of some of the best on-screen storytelling in a generation.

The Doctor flies around time and space (all of it) in the TARDIS, a time machine that can camouflage itself to hide in plain sight and just happens to be stuck in the form of a police phone box used by the London Metropolitan Police. He is of a species known as Time Lords from the planet Gallifrey, and is about 905 years old. In that time even he has gotten a bit cynical, and has started to take the wonders of the universe for granted. So he travels with companions, letting the lens of their awe keep his life of relative solitude exciting. Galleries of villains roll in and out of the lives of The Doctor and his companions, but their overall philosophy remains the same: “The universe is awesome and time is awesome, let’s go see all of it.” And when they come across someone who needs a helping hand? “We have to help.”

The problem has a loose American analogy in the rapid degeneration in relevance of the Superman mythology. Moral infallibility and nigh invulnerability are in low demand in the Age of the Anti-Hero, but those characteristics in both The Doctor and Superman are the source of their most interesting trait: their god complex. Showtime and HBO have given us a steady diet of overt crisis, so it’s understandable when subtext seems out of reach.

The Doctor and Superman are both immigrants obsessed with their adopted home world of Earth. Whereas Superman is a sworn protector in title, The Doctor is just a little more dedicated to the protection of Earth than any other planet because of his fascination and, ultimately, envy of the human species. They persevere, survive, and thrive right to the end of the universe and the onset of entropy in the Who universe, and their development and startling goodness as a species is a never-ending source of amusement for someone who has seen it all. The Doctor brings a human to be by his side so he doesn’t get off track, so mortality remains a constant factor and so his ability to violate the interstellar Hippocratic oath he lives by stays in perspective. He desires humanity, and the easiest way to shuck the burden of his abilities is to party with them. Humans are the favourite cause of a being with access to everything.

But even with the refreshing optimism that makes Who a total joy to watch, the newest incarnation of Doctor Who never forgets the sadism that goes along with great drama. Showrunners Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat make sure that, just like with Superman, the darkness is there, bubbling just under the surface. The Doctor faces the moral dilemmas of omnipotence regularly: if I’m the last one standing, that means I’m the victor and can do whatever I want? I feel a need for these companions, but am I ruining their lives by dragging them into danger? Who am I to decide what is right and what is wrong? Do the means justify the ends when all of time is available to me to see what the consequences are? The personal psychology of an impossibly old and wise man losing his way makes the current Who years a fascinating character study.

The source of that directionless wandering, that constant search for a moral compass? It is the core of what makes The Doctor who he is: When the adventures are done, The Doctor will always be alone, an immortal madman in a stolen blue box meant for a crew.

Battles!

The late night talk circuit may be a fading institution, but for the families of your average workaday musicians, that introduction by Conan, Letterman or Fallon might still be just the thing that convinces them that silly band of yours is a real thing.

“I had like various stages of that. My dad treated me differently when he saw my picture in Rolling Stone. He was like ‘Wow, you’re not just kidding around,’ ” says Ian Williams. He plays with a little band of massive acclaim called Battles, and they just released a tremendous new record called Gloss Drop. Still, in this world gone mad, it takes television to justify music. “It’s exactly the thing that translates to your aunt.”

Battles catapulted into the minds of music fans everywhere with their debut LP, Mirrored, in 2007. Less carrying the torch of the post-rock that came before it than snuffing it out and lighting a new one, it was a towering work, but nonetheless one that took a scenic route into the ear holes of the non-music nerd public. Appearing in everything from commercials to British teen soaps to video game soundtracks, standouts “Race : In” and “Atlas” were some of the best songs people had no idea were not written specifically for a product.

“You need strange new platforms to get your music out. People release their CDs now inside of magazines,” says Williams. He owes it to the loss of the small town (and even big city) record store, a much belaboured point, but sees the circumstances of their loss as a pyrrhic victory for musicians. “In some ways I’m not disturbed by what’s happened in the music world. In one way I think a band like Battles in a strange way, actually can get on Jimmy Fallon and other TV shows now. If you imagined 10, 15, 20 years ago, I think that there would have been more gates closed to us,” he says. “Our music would have been considered a bit more outsider. Now it’s not like Metallica has it all locked up because their publicist and manager have deep pockets. I think it’s healthy.”

From hearing Battles on the LittleBigPlanet soundtrack to hearing the album in full, a common reaction swells from new mainstream audiences: Where are the lyrics? Williams, who has played in bands similar to Battles dating back to the Tortoise-led instrumental rock movement currently monopolized by Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky, sees this challenge to ubiquity archaic. “I’ve been playing instrumental music since like 1992 in various bands. I remember instances in the underground indie world where it was a novelty not to have vocals and everyone was talking about that. Now that gimmick – well, it’s not a gimmick – that’s not really seen as a novelty anymore. It goes without even mention,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s shocking just within the bubble of underground indie trendy. I don’t even know if it’s shocking to your average guy in the suburbs who goes to an Aerosmith concert.”