Beginning with 1985’s Tuatara compilation, the New Zealand bands allied with Dunedin’s Flying Nun label became indie-pop manna in the US. The label’s flagship acts, the Clean and the Chills, released some of the best guitar-driven songs of their time, catchy but rarely cloying, vigorous but never macho. A few found their way onto American majors. But American studio polish sanded down their cultish charm, and the music’s funklessness limited its mass appeal. Even Flying Nun lost the plot — its last signing to garner notice here was the numbingly conventional D4.
But smaller labels still offer safe harbor to Kiwis who have stayed the course. Take the Bats, who headline T.T. the Bear’s place this Tuesday. Their first album in a decade, At National Grid, comes to the US via the Portland (Oregon) imprint Magic Marker. Since 1995’s Couchmaster, frontman Robert Scott has turned his hand to soundtracks (The Creeping Unknown), traditional material (Songs from Otago’s Past), and bursts of activity with fellow Dunedin first-wavers the Clean. The Bats, it seemed, were over. But they’ve picked up right where they left off: the studio cross-talk under “Western Skies” serves notice that At National Grid, like the semi-acoustic mid-’80s EPs that made their reputation, will be anything but slick.
Scott’s balanced songs, often sung in harmony with Kaye Woodward, have always been the Bats’ signatures. But their virtues as a band have never been more evident. Paul Keen’s elastic bass lines and Malcolm Grant’s economical beats form a tough rhythmic spine, and the guitars of Scott and Woodward tangle as often as they jangle. Tucked among the expected pastoral textures, there’s “Hubert,” a slinking instrumental, and “Pre-War Blues,” which is shot through with Fripp-style leads and Alastair Galbraith’s atonal violin break. The song hints at Scott’s left-leaning melancholia: before the solo, he simply repeats the title and the line “I just want to see the world through different eyes.”
The Renderers were relative latecomers to Flying Nun. But since their 1990 debut, Trail of Tears, husband and wife Brian and Maryrose Crook have edged from spectral alt-country toward earthier, more expansive pop. The two usually share vocals, but the new Ghosts of Vegas Lives (3 Beads of Sweat) is credited to “Maryrose Crook with the Renderers,” and her grit and restraint illuminate the music like headlights on an unimproved rural road. On “Dream That You’re Driving” and “The Outgoing Queen,” she sketches lives past all illusion (“Pills on the table, pills on the floor/Till you can’t remember what your body is for”) against skeletal backing — sometimes little more than her husband’s tremulous guitar and former Dead C drummer Robbie Yates’s distant snare strokes. But when these players bear down on the slow-building “Night Train,” they do it with all the gruesome concentration that the band’s name suggests.
