Bats, The - Guilty Office (Yesboyicecream) CD

The Bats are acknowledged legends of New Zealand music, standing alongside contemporaries The Clean and The Chills as lynchpins of the Flying Nun label and the Dunedin/Christchurch scene.

April 2009 saw the UK release of The Bats’ 7th full-length studio album, The Guilty Office, a mere 27 years since they first got together and 22 years since their debut album, Daddy’s Highway, with the original line-up of Malcolm Grant, Paul Kean, Kaye Woodward and songwriter Bob Scott still intact.



The Bats have always been better known - and bigger - in the US than they ever have been at home in New Zealand or in the UK and Ireland. In America, they’ve toured with Radiohead, made the front cover of Billboard, the Top 20 of the CMJ charts, and been name-checked by Pavement and REM (who also invited them on tour, tried to get them to sign to their friends’ label and insisted on playing Bats’ songs at full volume through their tour PA throughout a European Tour).



The emphatic reaction of their domestic press to The Guilty Office and recent critical success of Bats’ side-project Minisnap shows that this might just be their time to break through into popular consciousness at home and in the UK.

Tracklist:  "Countersign", "Crimson Enemy", "Broken Path", "Like Water in Your Hands", "Castle Lights", "Two Lines", "Satellites", "Later On That Night", "Steppin’ Out", "The I Specialist", "The Guilty Office" and "The Orchard"

Yesboyicecream  YB112CD