Bats & Mice: PS: Seriously. | ★★★★ | Lovitt Records | May 31
In 2020, I wrote an INDY feature on the “Lost Era of Indie Rock,” arguing that the local bands who made their impact circa 2000 had largely been forgotten because they weren’t covered by the major press like ’90s bands or captured on the internet like later ones. Four years on, I’m still regularly slapping my forehead when I remember someone I left out—though at least that does lend support to the premise.
But really. How the hell did I forget Bats & Mice?
Releasing its debut EP in 2000 and its lone album, Believe It Mammals, two years later, this Chapel Hill trio was one of the hottest local vendors of what we then called “post-hardcore” (because each generation makes up its own name for prettifying punk), a developmental stage that explains how emo got from Sunny Day Real Estate to My Chemical Romance.
Though Bats & Mice had all the soaring, desperate yelping you could want, they were subtler and more atmospheric than some shamelessly overwrought peers, heavily dosed with Joy Division, setting their livid outbursts against eerie, curving melodies and dark-hued guitar textures. They had multiple singers, and you could even sort of tell them apart. But they were all in other bands, and they eked out just two more short EPs.
Fourteen years since the last one, they’re back with a new full-length, PS: Seriously., and honestly, it’s way better than it should be. This isn’t just the boys dusting off the old stuff for a nostalgic cruise around the block. It’s the worthy follow-up Mammals always deserved, the sound intact but respectably matured, the band delivering the goods without trying to squeeze back into the skinny jeans.
Bats & Mice was sort of an indie rock rebranding of the melodic hardcore band Sleepytime Trio, and it shared members with groups like Engine Down and Rah Bras. Ben Davis was in the great Milemarker, the only group I know of to put the Carrboro Harris Teeter in a song. He also heads the long-running Ben Davis & the Jetts, whose dream-poppy 2001 album, The Hushed Patterns of Relief, I secretly liked even better than Bats & Mice.
Leaving out many lineup shifts, suffice it to say that two original members, singer-bassist Davis, and singer-guitarist David NeSmith, are here on PS: Seriously., with drummer Mark Oates, who joined when the album began percolating in 2012.
Why did it take so long? Starting families, building careers—all the life you write songs about.
Davis has said the songs were developed by playing long jams around meditative instrumental loops, and it shows in their focused but varied propulsion. Opener “Out of Line” finds NeSmith in lively, inspired form as he webs together bendy licks and fluid runs much like Seth Jabour, the guitarist of a recently reunited Bats & Mice contemporary, Les Savy Fav. With Oates pounding long smears of sleepy vocals to a screamy climax, it’s got everything you’d want in a Bats & Mice song.
Then “Buried Just Beyond” is like a pastoral take on arty British punk, and the guitar doesn’t explode with full force until “Space Race,” where Oates finds the exhilarating place between a groove and a roll and just sits in it like it’s no big deal. “Staring Straight” is especially striking, surging and crashing around one stuck, squealing loop, a good trick that reminded me of R.E.M.’s “Leave.”
But each song has a distinct feel, something unique to admire, and mood almost never relegates melody to afterthought, making PS: Seriously. one of the best, most surprising indie rock comebacks, in a crowded field, in recent memory.
Comment on this story at [email protected].