The Bats have spent more than a decade forging a reputation based on their excellent songwriting and reliably buoyant pop performances. On record, they often appear as modern day pastoral musicians, revealing the charms of their music and words in gentle pop epiphanies, while their live performances have gathered acclaim for the energy that the group's insistently strummy rock instils in crowds.

1993 has seen The Bats bring these two sides of their musical character closer together through the release of a powerful new album, Silverbeet, and four months of international touring as part of a Flying Nun package called Noisyland followed by a tour of major American cities with Belly and Radiohead. In short, it has been a great year for the band.

Silverbeet was welcomed as the Bats' best leap forward since 1987's classic Daddy's Highway (named one of the year's most noteworthy independent releases in American Billboard ). Released through Mammoth Records in America, the album featured strongly on college radio charts and outsold last year's Fear of God. The Noisyland tour, featuring The Bats, Straitjacket Fits and JPS Experience, was Flying Nun's highest profile international touring expedition ever, trekking across three continents and being warmly--and in many places, even ecstatically--received wherever it went.

The Bats pulled something of a surprise from their bag-of-a-thousand-songs with Silverbeet, their fourth album for Flying Nun. Surprising not because it contained another 13 slices of that simple yet chaotic pop (it did) but because it captures the sound of the Bats stretching to deliver something brilliant and distinctive in the studio with a noisy set of tunes selected by the group for their freshness and their diversity.

Silverbeet was recorded at the tail-end of The Bats' 1992 world tour in the small-town isolation of Stoughton, Massachusetts, USA. The two week recording session with producer Lou Giordano (responsible for recent recordings by Sugar and Pere Ubu, and older stuff like King Missile and Husker Du) took place at the Outpost Studio in Stoughton, and the album was then mixed at Carriage House in nearby Stamford, Connecticut (where Lou had also mixed the Pixies' Doolittle and Sugar's Copper Blue, and Barry White was booked in for a session after the Bats!).

Rather than record each instrument individually and piece the album together as they had done on their previous album, Fear Of God, the Bats and Lou chose to record Silverbeet song by song. The result is a set of outstanding performances by the group -- with real, uncontrived strength from ever-solid rhythm section, Malcolm Grant and Paul Kean, lung-bursting vocals from Robert and Kaye Woodward, and the first evidence of Kaye's guitar truly cutting loose on record!

Outstanding was also the adjective applied to The Bats' live performance at the New Music Seminar in New York in July. There, they sufficiently impressed the management of Belly (the alternative to MTV crossover success story of the year in America, with 400,000 copies of their Star album sold there) and Radiohead (the English band who broke into the American Top 20 in August with the single "Creep") that they were invited to join the groups on a two week tour of big American cities that followed the completion of Noisyland in September.

The Bats' live shows throughout New Zealand, Australia, North America, the UK and Europe this year have served to show the immense popularity of their music. Crowds have danced and cheered (in Boston, they even called out for The Chills' 'Pink Frost', but you can forgive an enthusiastic fan mixing their NZ groups in the heat of the excitement!) for The Bats everywhere they go.