The Guilty Office, The Bats
New Zealand's The Bats are mild-mannered, look-off music epitomised, and twenty-six year veterans of the art. Their influence, and that of the famed 'Dunedin sound' with which the band's members are variously associated, casts its unmistakable shadow over all late style 'indies' - from Superchunk to Panel of Judges - both in terms of their inviolate, post-Velvets under-playing and definitive expression of this music's end feeling: a contradictory, dreamy mixture of disenchantment and pleasure at once, sustained over and again in same-but-different songs without ever resolving the contradiction between the two.
The Guilty Office will delight anyone interested in reflective antipodean pop - meaning The Go-Betweens, The Chills, Underground Lovers, Small World Experience, Mum Smokes - trigger extended reverie in thirty-something Heads everywhere and send fans of new, US groups obsessed with NZ (Crystal Stilts, Pains of Being Pure at Heart) on Bats-genealogy record digs. The songs are ideal, unforced miniatures about spending time inside, the mysteries of friendship, dropping out in mottled sunspots and other dressed-down themes that are never maudlin, and without trace of frustration. Profound simple pie.
Release: Album
To Cure: A predictable playlist
Keywords: Mistletone Records, The Bats
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