Interview : BATS
“Developing at breakneck” doesn’t sound like the healthiest start to a year but despite juggling a full-time band and 9-5 job, things couldn’t be better for Rupert Morris. Not even fatigue can burst the creative bubble surrounding BATS‘ debut album, already one of the most highly anticipated Irish records of 2009.
“We’ve been super-busy getting everything ready to go to Salem next week to record our album with Kurt Ballou. Can’t remember what a free weekend is like. We played Cork on Saturday night. Rushed home on Sunday to finish writing the last song. Song 11. Before that we were wading through the click-track swamp for weeks. We’re on track now. We’ve been spitting out some of these songs easier than expected. Some not so easily but there’s definite buzz coursing through our neurons. We’re like kiddies the night before Christmas, knowing what presents we’re getting but not knowing what they look like.”
Hanging BATS
“We” are lyricist Rupert, conjoined with Craig Potterton and Conor McIntyre to bring the guitar tally to three, backed by Timmy Moran on bass and drummer Noel Anderson. Vocal roles range across the board. Martha Washington is their missing link, a band of which no trace remains: many months elapsed before the songs were fully weaned but since BATS hatched in late 2005 their music has grown into an instinct-driven freak like nothing Ireland’s ever known. When the progressive metal enthusiasts released their Cruel Sea Scientist EP on the Armed Ambitions (now incorporated into The Richter Collective) label just over a year ago, it was to an uncertain future. Diversifying rapidly, was alternative rock scene quite ready for 15 minutes’ textbook-thumping?
Apparently so. Gig and festival bookings erupted along with supports to cult visitors The Locust and Chrome Hoof. Reviews rained in, heaping praise for the EP’s constant barrage of killer rhythms which somehow managed to sustain a hardcore integrity despite tremendously wide-ranging, catchy appeal. From the first cacophonic caws of “Danger! Danger! Mankind! Mankind!” heralding ominous introduction Death To Kent Hovind down to Atom & Eve’s clinical finish, Cruel Sea Scientist’s outstanding originality meant any following album would have a hell of a lot to live up to. A split 7″ single with US sex-punks Fist Fite fell through in late 2008, so older songs like Witness The Diamond Heart never saw record play.
“That song’s ancient history. It wouldn’t fit at all with the new songs. We’re happy we’ve managed a really strong set of new songs for our debut. The oldest song is BATS Spelled Backwards Is STAB. We deliberately left it out of Cruel Sea Scientist to save it for the album. Now it feels like this little fighting BAT that’s clung in there, elbowed its way onto the album. It’s the runt. But it has teeth.
“Our tastes are always developing. You’re always discovering new stuff and that will certainly play a part in shaping what you’re doing. Our direction has changed from NW to NNW. Some new territories have been explored. We’ve written a couple of parts that we’ve deliberately structured in a complex progression that kind of throws you off. They’re quite hard to get your head round. Unpredictable. The harder something is to get into, the more you’ll love it when you do.
“This album definitely has more ’songs’ on it, if you know what I mean. They feel more like real songs, there are definite choruses for starters. There’s still the healthy amount of biology, prehistory and oceanography but I’ve branched into physics, superstition, mathematics and sex to name but a few. Touching on areas like carbon, the American purity movement, astrology, Fermat’s last theorem, temporal lobe epilepsy, Napoleonic naval warfare, gamma-ray bursts and burning witches. I’ve entered some new realms lyrically.”
There’s no witch town more famous than Salem, located in Massachussetts in the north eastern United States. Infamous for its Puritan 17th Century witch-hunts like those portrayed in Nathanial Hawthorne’s fictionalised account The Scarlet Letter, today Salem serves as an hub for the Occult community. A rather intense spiritual environment, considering the sceptical nature of Morris’ lyrics. It’s almost too coincidental to discover Kurt Ballou’s studio is called God City.
“It should be great to feed off the atmos. We have a day off in the middle where we’re gonna do all the sights. Apparently they do re-enactments of the witch-trials in the actual courthouse where they originally took place. I’m really pleased we’re recording somewhere with such a high degree of relevance to the themes of the album. Apart from the witch-burnings and superstitions associated with Salem, there’s also the fact that there were a lot of sea-serpent sightings in Massachusetts Bay in the late 19th Century. Something I touch on in one of the new songs The Cruel Sea.”
Promise aside, it still came as some surprise to hear the BATS debut would be produced by Ballou, guitarist of reknowned Hardcore band Converge. With a background in biomedical engineering (forced into redundancy, he used free time to focus on Converge while investing a hefty severance package in studio equipment and hasn’t looked back since), he obviously recognised the songs’ artistic and factual value.
“He has a background in bio-medical engineering?! I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THAT. Amazing.
“Going abroad wasn’t one of the criteria but finding a producer that could do it justice was and that inevitably meant going abroad. We are of course fans of Converge but in addition, Kurt has produced many albums we love: bands like Genghis Tron, Beecher, Transistor Transistor and Gospel are what swung it for us. We literally just asked him and he was into the tunes and he said he’d love to do it. We were actually surprised by the choice we had. Nearly everybody we contacted wanted to do it.
“He’s already helped us by identifying the need for a mechanical sound which can best be served by click-tracking. We had considered doing it but we knew we definitely should after that. So we got stuck in mapping them out and practicing to them and it has had an amazing effect. The songs sound so much tighter. After that it’s all about his experience in capturing the sound that we value. Recording is so much harder than it seems. Especially with heavy music.”
Kurt Ballou in God City Recording Studios
Thankfully heavy music is Ballou’s specialty. He made an interesting point in an interview of rarely picking up his guitar unless he had to. How instrumentally attatched are BATS?
“I can’t speak for the lads but I hate mine. I hate gear and techy shit. What I love is writing tunes and naming them and writing lyrics. I’m the opposite of a guitar nerd. I’m gonna go over there and say “Kurt, please make my guitar sound awesome”….”
Unleashing the BATS on America is a slightly daunting, curious prospect. It’s interesting to wonder how the band would fare in the broader expanse of the American live scene. CSS has already proved its wealth as a live set but the new songs inevitably evolve on that. Perhaps there are gig plans for Salem and that’s why they’ve given new material an early live airing. Feedback so far has been good:
“I absolutely love playing ‘Shadow-Fucking’. It’s a real bouncer. Everyone seems to get into it. It’s certainly the most accessible song we’ve ever written. Definitely one for the radio. Can’t wait to hear them try and announce it….As for gigs, I’m afraid we don’t have the time. I think it’s better to concentrate on one thing at a time anyway, hopefully we’ll get to play across the pond at some stage this year.”
As an avid Evolution advocate, the importance of 2009 is not lost on Rupert. Marking 200 years since Charles Darwin’s birth, the naturalist’s ground-breaking theory of Natural Selection has been proved beyond doubt as RSS feeds fill each day with new advances and discoveries. A dream dinner speaker, what would Darwin make of BATS and the world today?
“I think he would feel very pleased and proud that his work has been vindicated and confirmed by the achievements and progressions in Science since his death. Modern genetics alone would absolutely thrill him I think. Conversely I think he would be saddened by the deterioration of the bio-sphere and threatening of the atmosphere and climate by human greed and consumption.
I would also invite David Attenborough, Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins for starters, so they could be the ones to bring him up to speed. I’d just sit back and listen, it would be incredible. For the main course Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan for some cosmology and physics…and for dessert Jack Black would have to be there. Ooh and Bill Hicks!”
With such passion, one gets the feeling they’d be only too happy to oblige….
BATS play a final gig at the Lower Deck this Saturday 21 February before echolocating to Salem. Support from Wounds and Jenny and the Deadites. Doors 8pm - €8/€9.
[...] Nay has an interview with the band. [...]
Ah, I do love the BATS, and it’s great to see them get a bit of critical attention. I’d be delighted if the Kurt Ballou association could get them a bit of leverage stateside, because they’re certainly one of the most interesting hardcore bands around.
I was thinking about the thing you said about giving them leverage. I guess it will, for the same reason they asked him, they liked the results of other records he’w worked on so like-minded people might actually think the same about them. They were never gonna go for Mannix…
Ah, were you at the gig on Saturday? I finally got my first taste of BATS in the flesh (in the leather?) and it was everything I expected it to be. Would have enjoyed a couple of tracks off the EP, but I can’t really complain.
Indeeed, they only played Nautilus vs Irish Ferry from the EP but it was kinda fitting that as an album fundraiser they gave people their money’s worth. What did you think of the new songs though? They are all quite different to CSS….I missed Shadowfucking though. Booo to the silly bitches hogging the loos.