Even before you press play on Battle Stations, the third self-released album from Maryland instrumentalists Admiral Browning, the album is provocative. With fantastic, intricately-drawn artwork from the Los Angeles-based Sean “Skillit” McEleny, there’s a narrative happening across the album’s fold-out visuals. The digipak of Battle Stations opens as normal, and glued to the inside liner is a four-panel foldout poster that joins with the cover to reveal a full picture of three battleships (no coincidence, I’m sure, that Admiral Browning is a trio) going up against a giant, futuristic robot. To look at the cover image above, only the bottom left-hand corner is what you see at first on the digipak.

I’ve included the images after the jump, but what you can see immediately is that there’s a story playing out. On the outside cover, the fight is beginning and the ships look doomed. On the inside, guns ablaze, it looks like the invader is done for, and on the back cover, the alien robot’s carcass smolders on the horizon while the three ships look on, victorious.

All this interesting enough in itself, but taken in the context of Admiral Browning’s back-cover dedication – which reads, “Battle Stations is dedicated to all those remaining positive while battling life-threatening illness or disease, to those that persevere and overcome in the face of insurmountable odds, to those that rebuke thoughts of turning pain into suffering, and to survivors that refuse to give up” – Battle Stations becomes even more thematically loaded. The giant robot becomes a metaphor for some invading disease (cancer seems an appropriate example; tumors have long been depicted as outside invaders in art and literature), and with the musical notes surrounding the battle in the second panel, Admiral Browning are saying that music is at least part of winning the fight against whatever it is being fought.

Aside from being fodder for a deeper read of the album, the visual side of Battle Stations speaks to the conceptual breadth of the band. Doubly curious, then, that the theme and/or story arc doesn’t carry over into the music – or, at least not if titles like “Dreams of Mammurabi” or the Star Wars referential “The Binary Language of Moisture Vaporators” are to be taken on their face. One could easily imbue the five component tracks of Battle Stations as depicting a journey of overcoming conflict, but with well-flowing progressive-edged instrumentals, I get the sense you’d probably be able to do that anyway if you tried hard enough. Particularly as the album presses on to its later cuts, the Eastern-style “Interlude” transitioning smoothly into aforementioned closer “Dreams of the Hammurabi,” there is some feel of resolution in the tracks, but how much of that is put there by Admiral Browning and how much by me listening, I really couldn’t say.

Click images to enlarge:

On the most basic musical level, though, what Battle Stations does more than anything else is show off Admiral Browning’s virtuosic playing. Guitarist Matt LeGrow continuously rips through lyrical, melodic solos while crunching out riff after riff, and bassist Ron “Fezzy” McInnis and drummer Tim Otis have more or less set up shop in the pocket, remaining there the whole album through. McInnis’ creative runs, matched step for step by Otis on opener “Riff Crisis” and elsewhere, are a constant highlight and a huge part of what gives Battle Stations its progressive edge. More even than Admiral Browning’s 2009 EP, Magic Elixir – which was only about three minutes shorter than the new full-length at 34:34 – Battle Stations brings out this side of the band, which I didn’t previously get a full sense of until seeing them live.

Still, if you come into it looking for traditional songwriting, it’s going to be hard to keep a handle on the 10-minute “The Binary Language of Moisture Vaporators.” The song meanders into semi-psych guitar leads (underscored, again by McInnes tonal excellence) before, after five minutes in, the noise comes to an end and a count-in introduces the second half of the track, more structured and riff-propelled. It works when taken as part of Battle Stations as a whole, but to listen to the track on its own, Admiral Browning probably could have just as easily cut it into two songs. Nonetheless, there’s nothing about Battle Stations from its start that would lead a listener to expect Karma to Burn’s structural simplicity, so as “The Binary Language of Moisture Vaporators” moves into the shorter, airier “One Lucky Canary” – which actually shares the preceding cut’s “split down the middle” modus despite its more open feel – the impulse is to go along with Admiral Browning and see where the ride ends up, rather than wonder, “Hey, what happened to the song?”

And with the pair of “Interlude” and the 13-minute “Dreams of Hammurabi” winding it down, Battle Stations is a considerable distance to have traveled with the trio. Sporadic publicly-sourced samples throughout the tracks provide anchors for the listener to latch onto, Admiral Browning making way after two and a half minutes – literally fading out – to let a speech introduce the next movement of the song, and give a decent sense of balance to some of the more indulgent instrumentality. That shows maturity on the part of the band and a growing awareness of audience – though to the best of my recollection it’s nothing new, so it’s not so much that they do it, but how, that makes the difference – and sits well alongside the balance they maintain between technical interplay and riffy heaviness. Admiral Browning have been among underground Maryland’s most formidable live acts for a while now, and with Battle Stations, they’re beginning to prove they can translate that to a complete album presentation.

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Tags: Admiral Browning, Maryland, Middletown, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 19th, 2011 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.