Mistletone

Legendary New Zealand band The Bats have been playing their distinctive style of melodic infused pop folk/rock for long enough to have drifted in and out of fashion several times, without even trying. Let’s recap – it’s been well over 20 years so some might not know the background to The Bats ….

Often loosely referred to as an indie pop band, The Bats have amassed plenty of fans from their home base in Dunedin, New Zealand and offshore, notably in US where they  toured frequently from 1986 to 1993 with Radiohead and others, and won gushing reviews from every corner of the music press. From 1994 they were busy in New Zealand working on raising families, side projects of Minisnap (Kaye Woodward’s songs), The Clean and solo albums from Robert Scott. In 2000 they put together a Bats greatest almost hits CD, 1000’s of Tiny Luminous Spheres, followed by their 2005 studio album The Bats At The National Grid which was rapturously received by the critics and led to a US tour in 2006.On The Guilty Office – their seventh studio album and their Mistletone debut – The Bats continue to refine and develop their own idiosyncratic path, whilst also adding fresh sparkle and new ideas. The strings and additional instruments come to the fore, such as on the first single Castle Lights, and Robert Scott’s songwriting has become particularly strong on tracks such as Countersign and Crimson Enemy. It could have been the pentagonal room they recorded in at  Christchurch music doyen John Kelcher’s studio, or the proximity to Christchurch’s beautiful Heathcote River, but either way, the band have come up with an album that shines among their best.

>>> Fun Bats fact: the music for the title sequence of the ABC-TV political-comedy series ‘The Hollowmen’ is The Bats’ North By North.

The Bats are – Robert Scott (vocals, lead guitars); Kaye Woodward (guitars, vocals); Paul Kean (bass, guitar, backing vocals, production); Malcolm Grant (drums).

The Brag interview:

The Bats: The Art Of Not Thinking

By Mikey Carr

Having been together now for 27 years, The Bats – seminal exponents of ’The Dunedin Sound’  – are a bit of musical head scratcher. They’ve toured with Radiohead, but they still all have day jobs. They’ve influenced bands like Pavement and Yo La Tengo, but they’re from the ass end of New Zealand. Seriously, WTF?

The Bats formed in Dunedin on New Zealand’s South Island in 1983, after the break up of Robert Scott’s band The Clean, also part of the Dunedin Sound. Over the phone, Robert tells me that the movement’s unique brand of guitar driven indie-folk-pop was mostly developed in isolation – removed from the rest of the world and surviving on what meagre rations of punk, garage and krautrock they could lay their hungry hands on. “The only sort of connection we’d have to the rest of the world was The NME, and even that was three months behind because it was coming by boat.”

In this musical vacuum the Bats were able to hatch their sound free from the trend-obsessed culture of The US and Europe. “Because we were stuck down the bottom of the world, we weren’t too held up on trying to follow a trend – it was more just, these are our influences and we’re going to sort of channel them and turn them into our own thing.  The only sort of feedback we got was from the audience or the other bands as opposed to the media. It wasn’t a big industry there was no real print media as such, no TV shows or anything like that.”

Signed to Flying Nun, the influential imprint associated with the Dunedin Sound, by the late 80’s The Bats were touring the US on the back of the label’s artists who were getting flogged all over college radio, as well as in independent music zines. It was a prospect the band had never really considered.  “We didn’t really think ahead,” he explains with a laugh. “We don’t’ do a lot of thinking ahead, it’s very much a case of, ‘ah, this is good we’re getting to do another record; hey maybe we’ll get to do one next year, too.’”

This lack of pretension or ego is what really gives the band their appeal, both personally and musically. “It seems that people tend to pick up on that don’t they,” Scott replies. “They don’t like artists who are too contrived – they like things to be straight forward and honest, and we’ve always gone down that path, in that anything we put on the album we need to be able to play live.”

While other bands go off on overly cerebral musical wankfests, The Bats have spent the last 27 years slowly refining their sound. “I think that with each album we’re trying to hold up the high standard we’ve got. We don’t want to slip below our average, whatever it may be; we don’t want to start making sub par albums.

“We’re never going to turn into a reggae band or a dub band or a hardcore dance band. We could change things slightly or possibly push the envelope a little further if we feel the need, but we kind of like just tackling the next bunch of songs and taking them in the direction we think they need to follow.”

This dedication to refinement over reinvention is very present on their latest release The Guilty Office. “It’s a continuation of the other albums I suppose; there’s a lot of similar themes, and lyrically and musically it occupies similar area that the previous albums did. When we record we try and makes things different in some way, we don’t want to be repeating ourselves – but having said that, for the average Joe public or someone who’s only heard a few songs, it would sound pretty similar to our other stuff. However I think the fan who goes in depth with their listening will notice all the differences in what we’ve done.”

While the band aren’t likely to be releasing any Tommy-esque concept albums in the near future, Scott feels that’s it time they mixed up their formula a little bit. “Yeah, we’ve been talking a wee bit about making the soft ones softer, the loud ones louder and the weird ones weirder, and just trying to push it a wee bit more. We feel like we’ve maybe gone for the easy option when we’ve been recording lately. Sometimes that’s budgetary constraints or the studio isn’t ideal, or just time – but yeah this next one I think we might try and bend the envelope a bit.”

In true Dunedin style though, everything is still very much up in the air. “Really it just depends on what happens once we record,” he says, “and it depends on what I’m writing. I write at home and usually with an acoustic guitar, I don’t want to plug in and wake up the whole family” he tells me with a laugh, “so in some ways those songs can be reinvented when we play with the band… That’s something we find out when we get together and go over the songs.”