The Bats
Daddy's Highway

“If the world were going in the right direction (or at least in a better one than this), in a beautiful world in short, it would be the songs from this album that would be the singles on mainstream radio, this would be a “commercial” band”….
How many reviews comfortably end with this phrase… After catching, however, some pieces from bands like the Chills, the Clean, the Tall Dwarfs (to name three, but I might tease your auricular palate more by mentioning the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience!), and especially after discovering, which is not simple, this “Daddy’s Highway” (year '87), I have come to the conclusion that that beautiful world can really exist… and as in the best fantasy stories, at the antipodes of our beautiful country… I'm talking about that oceanic island called New Zealand…

I have not reached this theory through in-depth geological/geographical studies, nor by worrying about procuring the New Zealand singles charts of the past twenty years in some unfathomable way; I have simply listened to the seventeen precious and exquisite pearls of this (almost) lost treasure… The Bats are artisans from another time, who craft small masterpieces in unique examples by meticulously carving wood with small tools. What is born are small objects, however, so well-curated, simple but original, that you never tire of looking at them and passing them between your fingers, admiring their minute perfection… Even craftsmanship is a work of art, even an old piece of wood can create something beautiful if you know the secrets of the trade; and The Bats do nothing but a sparkling and direct folk-rock understood in the various and best forms it can have been heard from the Sixties onward, from the Byrds to the lesser-known West-Coast bands (Chocolate Watchband and others), to the ultimate college/folk-rockers of the Eighties, the REM from Athens that resonate in many pieces of DH. But their style is so unique, with vocal harmonies that are never banal, always irresistibly attractive, irresistible electric jingle-jangle chimes and above all a bass that alone would make the “greatness” of the album with its lines that are another song within the song…

So suspicious people, come in, the little “Bats-shop” is open to everyone and it will not disappoint you…