Corner Coming Up
By The Bats
The reliable Bats, one of the world’s most stable line-ups – Robert Scott, Kaye Woodward, Paul Kean and Malcolm Grant together since 1982 – embedded their early folk-jangle songs Made Up in Blue, Block of Wood, North By North and Smoking Her Wings in a generation’s autobiographies.
However more expansive recent albums – notably Free All The Monsters (2011) and The Deep Set (2017) – have been among their best, their musicianship so assured they released the instrumental version of 2020’s Foothills as Foothills Sans Voix.On this 11th album they again pull subtle surprises and a melancholy behind melodies is evident: overtly on the opener The Gown that takes a downward turn through guest Tex Houston’s gloomy keyboard strings. And there’s palpable fragility and vulnerability evident in Lucky Day, the tidal surge of the title track and the alluring Smallest Falls.
Elsewhere there’s quintessential Bats: A Line to the Stars, the delicate A Song for the End, the brightly blazing A Crutch A Post, the country-rock of Nature’s Time with the Gaia warning: “she’ll have the final say” … And the energetic Loline closes a fine album with grit-pop. The Bats, as always, make the interesting seem effortless, lightly veiling their depth behind enticing surfaces.
Neverlasting
By Bill Direen/Bilders
In a digressive interview with the Listener online recently, marking his Arts Foundation Laureate award, writer/musician Bill Direen credited the many musicians he’d worked with over the decades to realise his genre-shifting songs. Among them, drummer Malcolm Grant who went on to join The Bats.
However Direen’s 2024 Dustbin of Empathy and this new one – both with multi-instrumentalist Alex McManus and bassist Matt Swanson, formerly with American alt-country indie rock band Lambchop, and a few former Bilders – are more consistently self-contained.
That’s welcome news for those treasuring his 1983 Beatin Hearts, which Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd considered “a masterpiece” and “totally timeless”. Here are 15 typically idiosyncratic songs, which include the portentous jangle of White Guitar and intimidating political thugs doing their rounds in Blam Patrol in “a town of eyelids of glare and gloom, of beings in charge and beings unhinged”.
There’s also finger-picking guitar with an unsettling background lyric between the foreground vocal on Shakin’; Danced All The Same is an oblique love song and there’s spoken word over a disturbing soundscape on the political Tetrapak (“dumbing the voice, numbing the choice, so rats can have the run of every palace”).
Direen combines easy-entry songs with loaded messages as on Hard to See (“It’s not hard to see what’s going on, starvation, cruelty. Then it’s hard to see what’s going on”) and the title track reminds us “we’re the neverlasting renter-squatters of Earth exhausted”.
After decades of albums going straight past most people, Direen’s return to a more distilled approach is engaging and effective. But it’s Bill, so you should have expected that reference to the Greek science philosopher Empedocles.
Bill Direen tour dates: Audio Foundation, Auckland, November 4; Cabana, Napier, Nov 5; Pyramid Club, Wellington, Nov 6; Lyttelton Coffee Company, Nov 7; Pearl Diver, Dunedin, Nov 8.
