Battle - ‘Tendency’ (Transgressive) Released 06/03/06

‘I know I dance like a drunken arse… let me drink myself to death to forget about the rent’.  Lyrically were on well-trodden ground here; couldn’t these words be equally sung by Richard Archer, Alan Donahue or Mike Skinner?  Maybe, but in lines such as ‘This is my only tendency/This is all I have left, you see’, there’s a certain sense of anguish going on here that’s absent in the output of at least two of those songsmiths.  Meanwhile, The Cure’s guitars stab at swathes of New Order synths while a Bloc Party beat floors the accelerator.  Icily cool.