Both Battles (post Reich post-rock with guitar loops, frenetic sampling of live instruments, 2 step beat boxing, musique concrete, drummer with very tall hi hat) and Gang Gang Dance have re-instated a belief in the power of live music to actually be exciting, as both of them appealed to brain and to feet . . . Crucially both these bands have superb drummer . . . These two are the exception to the "get rid of the drummer" rule that Swears has been banging on about elsewhere...
I'd agree that no matter how you slice the musical landscape, Battles are one of the best 'bands' around. They do in fact incorporate all of the features that gek mentions - except that the tall cymbal is a crash cymbal, not a high-hat (which Stanier keeps close by and works with mechanical patience) - but also crucial to their elegant musical success is (a) a musicality lacking in many flavor-of-the-month bands, and (b) they have all been around for a very long time. The drummer, John Stanier, was the original drummer in Helmet, a band who for about one record maybe two, were quite something in '91-93. I saw Helmet's first tour, just months after the first record was released, winter of 1992, and it was one of the more frightening things I had up til then experienced. Though they sounded 'metal' on record, in concert they sounded like a gigantic, utterly precise machine, completely mechanical, but made with warm staccato guitars and a disgustingly precise and disciplined drummer. That drummer was Stanier.
As for the other members of Battles, Ian Williams played in what remains the definitive math unit, Don Caballero. He went from them to another band, Storm and Stress. Tyondai Braxton is the son of none other than Anthony Braxton, but also an accomplished solo artist in his own right. Dave Konopka was in Lynx. So when these four fellows decided to play together, they had each already participated in over a decade (or two) of music history and, in some cases, had seen the rise and fall of Touch & Go and Amphetamine Reptile-style heaviness, the emergence of 'post-rock', the ebb and flow of jungle and other 'electronic' genres, etc etc . . . the point being that when they set out, they knew what they were after.
That being said, I still think that their strength is the live show, which is utterly incandescent, machine-like but virtuosic without ego - churning out multiple loops with guitars, keys (sometimes played simultaneously), samples, and a live kit. It doesn't always translate on record. The new one could change that.