As we prepare for the 2011 Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, we are bringing you previews of several of the bands playing that we are looking forward to seeing. In the days leading up to the festival on July 15th, you can stop by ENS and see a P4K centric preview for the bands.

Enjoy a quick preview of the upcoming set from Battles. Yet another performance we are really excited to see this year at Pitchfork.

WHO?: Battles are an experimental rock band from New York, who consistently put out some of the more polarizing tunes in the indie rock space. Big fans love it, while others just don’t get it. Their debut full length, Mirrored, really put them front and center in the indie space, and in large part thanks to the massive jam “Atlas”, they jumped to the front of the pack quickly.

WHEN?: Battles are scheduled to play during Pitchfork at 4:35pm on the Green Stage on Friday July 15th.

WHY?: Seeing Battles live really helps explain the multiple layers of sound the band uses to make it’s complex sound. The much anticipated second full length album, Gloss Drop, was released earlier this summer and features guest appearances from Gary Numan, Kazu Makino, and Yamantaka Eye. We are particularly fond of the Numan track, and you can give it a listen below. A 12″ single for the song is being released on colored vinyl on August 16 via Warp Records. It should also be noted that the follow up to Mirrored, is a real change in direction for the band since Tyondai Braxton left to pursue a solo career. Braxton is a incredibly talented musician, but Battles minus his cartoony vocal on some songs will be a welcome change for polarized fans.

PITCHFORK SAYS: The festival curators gave Gloss Drop a solid 7.4 and we think this excerpt from the review by Jess Harvell sums things up pretty well…

Mirrored was an album that made its impact via complexity and speed and wild humor, a sound that owed as much to the orchestral zaniness of classic cartoon soundtracks as the grimmer heads-down virtuosity of the metal and math-rock bands in which the Battles members made their names. Not only could these guys pull off these wild instrumental zigzags at high velocity, they made ultra-tricky, computer-assisted pop-prog sound like fun. For their circumstances-dictated new direction, Battles have slowed their roll a bit, foregrounding both the pop and propulsive qualities of the music rather than its can-we-top-ourselves inventiveness. It still sounds like devious fun, but the sort you get from a band tweaking audience expectations.

My Machines (Featuring Gary Numan) by BATTLES