The Bats - Free All The Monsters - Flying Nun - FNCD513

Today, The Bats enjoy sudden profile spikes via a global circuit of scholarly rock festivals curated by bigger names, who fashioned themselves partly in the New Zealand veterans' image.
The quartet's eight album in thirty years and the band still sounds like a downbeat Byrds running on rusted Velvet Underground rhythms, but In The Subway is as driven and dense as the best of their back catalogue.

Front-man Robert Scott was wistful at twenty-one but balding, bearded, and beautifully bloomed, these older and wiser Bats wield their melancholy melodies as warmly as their more frantic former selves.

(8/1/12)