About Me
BATTLE OF MICE
A Day of Nights
Neurot Recordings
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 A Day of Nights were tracked reflects this psychological putrefaction: Before the albums final song was recorded, an unnamed band member accidentally fell down the stairs.
That there never was a more violent conflict is a matter of record: The armies of the two nations with the greatest military reputation were fighting an evenly matched battle.
Quintus Curtius Rufus, The History of Alexander the Great (volume 6; 1)
After the successful invasion of Crete in or around 331 B.C., King Agis III of Sparta laid seige the fledgling Arcadian city of Megalopolis. He was met by Alexander the Greats regent, Antipater, and a force of 40,000 Macedonian soldiers. The resulting battle is referred to historically as one of the bloodiest in Alexandrian times, with a recorded death toll of nearly 9,000 men. According to legend, Agis slaughtered a handful of enemy warriorswhile on his kneesbefore being killed by a Macedonian javelin. Despite the carnage at Megalopolis, Alexander was unimpressed. Upon hearing of the battle, he is alleged to have said, It seems, my friends, that while we have been conquering Darius here, there has been a battle of mice in Arcadia. (Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus, 15).
Battle of Mice, the band, finds its origins in a similar, if considerably less deadly, brand of antagonism. Vocalist Julie Christmas and guitarist/keyboardist Josh Graham met in Austin, Texas, when their respective bandsMade Out Of Babies and Red Sparowes played the South By Southwest Music Festival in 2005. The pair hated each other immediately. When the two bands embarked on a West Coast tour together later that year, Julie and Josh's attitudes toward one another took on a decidedly different hue. A long-distance relationship (Graham in LA; 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 bassist Tony Maimone (Book of Knots, ex-Pere Ubu) and drummer/producer Joel Hamilton (Book of Knots, Players Club, Glazed Baby), Battle of Mice entered Studio G in Brooklyn and recorded seven songs for their debut full-length, A Day of Nights. By the time the band finished tracking five of the seven songs, Josh and Julies 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, Julie and Josh couldnt 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 Giants 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 isnt 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.
