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By ROB JONES  

It sounds like something Johnny Ball would listen to when he’s thinking of a number or lunching with Zoë and Norm, but you wouldn’t count on math rock being in a typical algebra teacher’s CD collection.

In fact, if there was ever a musical genre for older folks in tweed jackets to pipe up clichés of the “It’s just noise” variety, this is it. And math rockers would unlikely be disappointed by such a dismissive assessment.

More complex than geometry, and possibly as inessential to your life after the age of 18, math rock is an acquired taste and doesn’t make a lot of sense the first time you hear it.

It’s Beefheart- and Zappa-inspired avant-garde weirdness, eclectic instrumentation and erratic stop-start rhythms that jump from one off-kilter time signature to another. One minute it’s dark, dirgey rock, the next it’s jazz tunes ahoy, and then, frankly, it’s unlistenable filth. And vocals? Usually muffled and indiscernible, sometimes high-pitched and squeezed through an electronic toolbox.

Although the phrase math rock was coined in the late ’80s, you’d be no dunce for never having heard of it. Math rock is roughly as popular a talking point in social circles as trigonometry.

It sounds like the musical equivalent of adding two and two together and making five-and-a-half, but it’s probably the most calculated sound structure around, carefully pieced together to confuse, twist and disturb.

Joyous absurdism

And now New York math rock foursome Battles have made what is being touted as one of 2007’s must-have albums. Their full-length debut, Mirrored, has been called “breathtaking” by Pitchfork and “joyous absurdism” by Blender, while The Guardian gushed that the band are in another league.

True, it’s like nothing else. Atlas, the first single from the album, sounds like an android Smurf squeaking sinisterly “People will be people when they hear the sounds” over a sinister psychedelic Marilyn Manson-esque cabaret.

Sounds rubbish, right? NME made it their single of the week. As singles go, it’s no Crazy In Love or Chelsea Dagger, but, against the latest crop of rot, Atlas would be the one song you’d want to hear again, if only because one listen isn’t enough to determine whether it’s a work of genius or utter garbage.

Math rock as a whole is hit and miss, but it’s never short of inventive. It’s a cacophony of noise on first listen. Repeated tastes will either do nothing to stop your ears bleeding or shower your ear canals with creative wonderment.

Raising the roof

Not unexpectedly, the oddness is not confined to the studio. When defunct Chicago math rockers Sweep The Leg Johnny played Michigan Fest in what looked like an old office a few years ago, guitarist Chris Daly scaled a giant amp during the set, knocked through one of the ceiling tiles with his head and continued to play while only visible from the waist down, as if this was all perfectly normal. He then edged himself entirely into the roof for several seconds until the ceiling collapsed and he fell into the crowd. You could say he did it without dropping a note, but you probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

So visually, the math rock scene is an engaging draw. It was rather a novelty that Sweep The Leg Johnny frontman Steve Sostak spent most of his time on the saxophone – further evidence that the vocals are the least important factor. Don’t expect to see many “math rock band seeks singer” listings in the want ads.

The sound would have to dumb down to break into the mainstream, but that would be missing the trick. Actually, there are few survivors from the era when you could just make noise, call it rock and get away with it, and fans of loud music are looking for something a little more testing.

If math rock’s multi-instrumental scientists fail to shape modern music, it will take the honour of generating the most wonderfully obscure song titles of any genre, the likes of which make a Tenacious D album tracklist look plain and conservative.

Almost every song in Don Caballero’s back catalogue read like punchlines to Eddie Izzard jokes or lines from Michael Caine films. The Pittsburgh-based act’s greatest hits include Let’s Face It Pal, You Didn’t Need That Eye Surgery, the unnecessarily repetitive and upper-cased ANDANDANDANDANDANDANDANDANDAND, A Lot Of People Tell Me I Have A Fake British Accent and the none-too-brief In The Absence Of Strong Evidence To The Contrary, One May Step Out Of The Way Of The Charging Bull.

But the most magnificently surreal song title of the lot, and possibly of all time, goes to the afore-mentioned roof-wreckers Sweep The Leg Johnny, who summed up the consciously rash nature of math rock with a six-word puerile gem: Sometimes My Balls Feel Like Tits. Childish class.