Album Review: Bats - Good Game Baby

You got a new job, and it’s important.

And I found myself, somewhat recently, in a similar position as to where I was at this time, both last year, and this time the year before that. Describing the circumstances as being “between jobs,” is generous, and errs on the side of a kind of understanding and patience that others might have with me, or be willing to show me, but I do not often have with myself.

At the end of 2021, I walked away from the job I had held for over five years. It was good until it wasn’t. And the combination of working through nearly two years of the pandemic, being confined within a building that, for ten of those months, was under construction, tensions rising (for obvious reasons) amongst my co-workers, and a lack of trust and support in management, among myriad other things, caused my mental health, and overall well-being to plummet. 

And without the capacity to spend time looking for another job to move into, and more out of a desperate need to try to not so much save myself but salvage what I could of myself, I put in notice, and left, and spent roughly the next four months wondering what to do next.

And it would have been early in 2022, on one of the many, many days where, in an effort to simply get out of the house, and prevent, or if not prevent, at least delay, the inevitable spiraling I would find myself doing, I was sitting at one of the two or three shops I would regularly patronize, when I happened upon an interview from the music site For The Rabbits with Jess Awh, who, at the time, had just released her second album under the moniker Bats.

And, if I am remembering this correctly, and it is a little surprising, honestly, in going back to skim the piece I had written in March of 2022 about the Bats album Blue Cabinet, because I think that, at the beginning of that year, I was really struggling—not with “writer’s block” exactly, but rather, I was having a hard time finding an authentic way to approach writing about the album. 

And what is surprising, given that it was ultimately challenging to navigate my way into it and articulate what I thought to be charming and genuinely interesting about it, is that the piece itself, comparatively to what I am doing now, only two years later, doesn’t seem all that long. 

Maybe not everything has to be that long, or become so layered and potentially overcomplicated.

I suppose that speaks for more facets of my life than just writing. 

Two years, as a measurement of time, inherently, doesn’t seem like all that long. I mean, yes, sure, it can be, but also not really. Or not quite. But, within the minutiae that makes the days turn into weeks, and the weeks into months, things can, and often do happen. Sometimes small. Sometimes large, or of the utmost importance.  

You write more, but more words, not very frequently, and about fewer things; or, despite your best efforts, you still cannot find the words, however few, or many, to write about something else. 

Through no fault of your own, and as kind of a surprise but also, maybe not, you begin to lose touch, or fade away, from a friend that you did not think you would; or, you find yourself making an instant, close, intense connection with somebody whom you just met, and shortly thereafter, you cannot fathom your life without their presence and company. 

You take a new job—it’s a job you can do, yes, but you become unhappy faster than you would have liked. You leave after six months. 

You take a new job—it’s a job you can do, yes, but you realize quickly that it is not very stimulating. You find elements of it frustrating, and your demeanor is, seemingly, misunderstood or misinterpreted. You make it six weeks.

You are “between jobs” for two months. You spiral. It’s hard not to. 

You take a new job—it’s a job that, within the first four days, you are uncertain if you can, in fact, do it. You wonder if you’ve made a mistake. If you’re in over your head. If you’re capable. If you’re “the right fit.” 

And you wonder if it’s you—if you are just simply not employable. If you’re too depressed. If you’re too caustic. 

You receive less and less support from your supervisors. 

You are not doing well. Personally or within the job itself. 

You don’t even make it a full calendar year, and the very end is unceremonious and completely expected. 

You got a new job, and it’s important.

*

And what I thought I had spent quite a bit of time on, or at least it felt like I had spent quite a bit of time on, when writing about Blue Cabinet, two years ago, was what I was looking for, as a music listener and appreciator, within “indie rock,” as a genre—because there are certainly nuances and specifics into what has become simply a broader descriptor for music—like, who is making it, what does it sound like, how is it being released, et al. 

Awh, and Bats, on Blue Cabinet certainly, but now, as well, on the project’s third outing, the recently released Good Game Baby, does fall within a number of places on the sliding scale of “indie rock”—thanks, mostly, to the kind of whimsical, sometimes chintzy, regularly lo-fi sound that Awh favored when she began Bats, in earnest, in 2018, with her first full-length arriving just a little over four years ago.

And there has been, of course, and as you would anticipate, a lot of growth, both in scope and in confidence for Awh as a songwriter and performer since the project’s humble early days—and even over just the last two years, there has been a noticeable and admirable evolution within Bats as a “band,” with Awh stepping in, then, as a “band leader,” or frontwoman, and you can hear that kind of ambition in a handful of places across Good Game Baby, where there moments when the songs just absolutely soar as high as they are able to be taken. 

The growth, and confidence, or maturation—whatever you want to call it, is impressive, yes, and it does make for spots of sheer ramshackle exuberance within Good Game’s nine tracks, but what is even more impressive, or at least more compelling about the way the album is structured, is how Awh knows how, and when, to turn things further inward in sound—and even further still at times—never forgetting or forsaking the project’s humble, home-recorded beginnings, while still working to develop the slightly more expansive, yet restrained, gentle, western-tinged, and ultimately bittersweet leaning aesthetics that she began to dabble within a few key tracks on this album’s predecessor. 

Now three albums in, Good Game Baby is not intended to be a definitive artistic statement for Awh and Bats (nor should it be expected that it is), but it is an extremely thoughtful collection of songs—at times funny, often nostalgic, heartfelt, and reflective, from a young songwriter who continues to foster her voice, her sound, and confidence, with impressive results. 

*

Released as one of the advance singles from Good Game Baby (of which there were three prior to the March 1st arrival of the album in full) and smartly placed as the album’s opening track, “Going For Oysters,” one of the more raucous songs of the nine, does not really set a tone, musically speaking, for the songs that will follow, since Awh and her assemblage of players do almost immediately pull things back for the poignant, hushed, twangy second track—but, with “Going For Oysters”’s enormous, distorted electric guitar strums and seemingly bashed out percussion, it does grab your attention. 

And what is worth paying more attention to, outside of the heights that the song ascends to almost from the moment it begins, and the places that it’s guided structurally, are Awh’s lyrics, and the vivid, yet fragmented narrative that she crafts within and delicately allows to unfold throughout the song’s gradual rises and falls. 

Songs, within contemporary popular music, are traditionally, or usually, built around a “verse/chorus/verse” structure, and then within that, there can be an emphasis, or at least the implication within the song’s arranging of a kind of tension and release that continues to writhe throughout, often, mirroring how the lyrics are organized, in what is described often as “quiet/loud/quiet.” “Going For Oysters” follows this, and while it might not seem like that big of a deal or something worth really noticing about the song, because it is the opening track, and because it is so noticeably much larger in size, sonically, when compared to the material from the previous two Bats records, it does become a compelling, though small detail, as the song begins, prior to the first verse, with these enormous, snarling strums of the electric guitar and the crashing of the snare and cymbals on the drum kit. 

For the verses, Bats pulls things back to a place of gentle reserve, so that the focus can be on Awh’s narrative, with a space in between the tension and release serving as the backdrop for the song’s soaring chorus—not quite crashing, not quite snarling, and held together by a strong, memorable vocal melody, and the mournful, slow twang of a pedal steel.

And I mentioned it in my piece about Blue Cabinet, because it was something that I had specifically written at the top of my notes about that album, and it is something that has not changed about Awh’s songwriting in the last two years, because Good Game Baby is, like its predecessor, a songwriter’s album. Across the board, in nearly every song on the album, Awh’s penchant for lyrics that are honest, observational, personal, and extraordinarily vivid in the portrait that they paint is impressive, to say the least.

There is an ambiguity that she uses within her songwriting—never really playing her hand entirely or revealing who the antagonist, or off-stage character is, or, rather, what her relationship is to them, which does both make these songs more widely accessible or identifiable to a listener, but they also create what I found to be a heightened sense of urgency when listening. Not that I was, like, on the edge of my seat in suspense, needing to know, and not that Awh owes us any explanation that she does not wish to give, but it does, whether intentional or not, in a number of places, leaves the slightest trace of an unsettling feeling, because there is this element of uncertainty. 

“Going For Oysters” has that element to it, and the narrative that is crafted is outstanding in just how compelling and evocative it is—throughout, Awh, unflinchingly, details the kind of intrusive questions one has, but more than likely, does not wish to look up online, like “Does it hurt when you go blind,” “Can you tell when you lose your mind—and how do you fight the panic?,” and “Does dementia feel like clouds in your brain that you can’t get around.”

The dynamic between Awh as the song’s protagonist, and this additional character within the story, is sweet, or at least there’s a gentleness within the depiction, specifically when the song swells just a little in the chorus—“We go down to the fun part of town where you treat me to things I can’t afford,” Awh says, slowly allowing the words to tumble and skitter onto the surface of the music that is just below her, before that sweetness takes a bit of a snarky turn. “You’re a loser, and I’m a pariah, but I never liked keeping score.”

She returns to that tenderness though, in one of the song’s more poignant, sentimental lines, arriving in the second verse—“In the dungeon of your heart, you say I’m a light switch on the wall.”

*

The tenderness, or sweetness, though, that is found in “Going For Oysters,” and is sprinkled elsewhere throughout Good Game Baby does recede at times to reveal that a lot of these songs are about heartbreak, or at least the demise of a relationship, and the sorrow that is felt in that aftermath.

“Oh My God,” is one of those songs—glitchy and whimsical, sequenced third on the album, it was the second single released in advance of Good Game Baby, and with its slinking, clattering drum progression, and cutesy keyboard squawks that ripple and burst throughout, it is not a stark contrast to the straightforward guitar-driven sound of “Going For Oysters,” but it does show a totally different side to Awh’s songwriting and the band’s dynamism.  

That whimsy, glitchy, and cutesy nature, though, is smartly used to offset the real desperation, and ultimately the pleading that Awh’s lyrics have as she grapples with facing a relationship’s sudden, or at least unexpected, severing.

“Give me a minute to talk to you,” she begins. “I think I can change your mind. If you’re leaving ‘cause of me that’s a big mistake—if it’s something else, I guess that’s fine,” she resigns. 

There’s no real chorus to “Oh My God,” but just Awh’s further attempts to understand, or change the mind of the off-stage character in the story. “Tell me the truth,” she demands within the third verse. “Tell me that you’ve grown. Tell me that it’s not the same now when we’re alone,” she continues, before arriving at one of the more telling, sobering lines, as well as the rather vivid final verse. “You don’t need me to hold you anymore ‘cause you got strong,” she says, before recalling fleeting moments from within the relationship, perhaps as a means of trying to hang onto the pieces of it that were good, or will provide comfort to her now.

“Shipley’s in the park,” she begins. “Jim Beam in the dark,” and then one of the most evocative portraits from the song, and maybe the entire album. “My fingers on your collarbones.”

The tone, and pacing, of Good Game Baby is structured so that it does find a balance between sounds both larger and more inward—and after the skittering slink of “Oh My God,” Awh does steer things into a more insular, quieter, and lo-fi inspired sound on the rather stark, blunt “Thanks to U.”

For all of the twang that courses throughout her work fronting Bats and the kind of idiosyncratic “indie” leanings that the project has (certainly on this album, as well as on Blue Cabinet), a lot of Awh’s songwriting is steeped in a more folk-oriented tradition and sound, which serves as the underscore for the startling narrative of “Thanks to U.”

Musically, “Thanks to U” is rather sparse in comparison to some of the songs that come before it, simply because it is just Awh’s voice, given a little bit more depth through a multi-track effect, and the very deliberate, pensive strumming on the guitar, which creates a soft bed for the gentle vocal melody that comes tumbling down on top of it.

Over the sound of tape hiss and birds chirping outside, there is something subtly quaint and charming about how sweet or unsuspecting how “Thanks to U” is packaged, but the most surprising thing about it, again, a contrast between the arranging and progression used, is the serious nature of its lyrics, as Awh details both her remorse over the dissolution of a relationship, and her involvement in a car accident, singing both in a near deadpan delivery.

“I wanted to call,” she begins with her voice coming in just as deliberate in its pacing and where the words land as the guitar strums are. “Tell you you’re sweet—tell you about my car crash and my week. But we sort of agreed you’re not that person for me anymore.”  

Awh, in depicting this accident, does so without hesitation or mincing her words. “This kid ran a red light,” she begins within the third verse. “Hurtled into me like a flicked cigarette. I flew like a grey dove into the parking lot of Truist Bank,” she continues, before offering up some kind of assurance—to herself, certainly, but also to the person that “Thanks to U” is directed toward. “I’m fine—baby, I’m fine. But I’ve been thinking that I should say thanks to you.”

Again, with no actual chorus, and just a gradual, catchy, somber melody that she follows, the last two verses of “Thanks to U” take a poignant and earnest turn. “So thanks for being that person for me for, like, a month and a half our lives,” she confesses. “It really meant a lot. I’m gonna think of you the next couple of times I almost die.” 

And there is no resolution, or easy answers, for Awh in a number of these songs, or moments that she crafts, across Good Game Baby, but maybe she’s not looking for that—and would rather just give us this small window into her thoughts, or these memories, or these very specific situations, before understanding that, even without a conclusion, it’s time to move along to the next. 

“I swear I won’t call, ‘cause that’d be out of bounds,” she concedes in the final lines. “Sometimes my head can get slammed into the windshield and all my words stay in my mouth.” 

*

And it might come as a surprise to some because I can, and often do, have a rough exterior, or can be perceived as being rather caustic, but I am ultimately rather sentimental and earnest. 

Good Game Baby is not a “breakup album,” though it does, in a number of places, depict what one feels, or experiences, at the end of a relationship—but there also places where Awh takes the tenderness that she hinted at in the opening track just a bit further. She’s not writing love songs. No, not really. And not even really songs “about love,” but has crafted moments where the notion of love, or a kind of care, is woven in to make for some of the album’s most thoughtful instances. 

The third single released ahead of Good Game Baby is the slower, and subtly country-tinged “Sand Time Machine,” which is tucked in near the end of the record. 

Opening with the glisten of a harp, that gives away to the mournful, cavernous twang of the pedal steel, and a glacially paced tempo that is brushed out quietly on the snare drum. And in my notes, for whatever reason, after describing the instrumentation used within “Sand Time Machine,” I wrote that this was a “cute song,” though I think that, upon sitting down to actually make sense of those notes, I may have been mistaken.

There is, of course, a delicate nature to it—the harp certainly helps with that, though it does not play that large of a role the further along into the song you get. And, within that delicacy, there is a sweetness, sure, that is implied, but the song itself, lyrically, walks a line between being earnest, and sentimental, and regarding love, but also terribly heartbreaking.

“How I hate to be a ghost—I make his eyes look haunted,” Awh sings in the song’s chorus. “I try to let him know it’s not what I wanted. Love is like an hourglass with no bottom that you empty, then you leave…A sand time machine.”

Love is like an hourglass with no bottom. 

That you empty, then you leave.

And I think, maybe, what I meant by “cute,” was perhaps gorgeous, and those are, of course, two different things, really, because musically, and within the melodies that intertwine, “Sand Time Machine” is quite devastating in just how beautiful it sounds, though Awh is, in creating a stark contrast, rather unrelenting in the portrait of sadness, or remorse, that she paints in the second verse. 

“I would like to scour his bathroom tile and scrub his baseboards,” Awh explains. “I would go out back and pick the flowers off his weeds—put them in a jar, and set it on the kitchen table,” she continues, before getting to the rather emotionally charged punchline within the song. “And sit right there, pretending he still belongs to me.”

Love is like an hourglass with no bottom.

Awh writes about what love is like earlier in the album, on the standout “Downtown Sucks You Can’t Park Anymore,” which, outside of the run-on sentence within the surprisingly frank and specific title, it is one of the more wistful, self-reflective (and self-effacing), thoughtful songs on Good Game Baby, and musically, it is the first place on the record where Awh and Bats turn things into a more esoteric, lo-fi, and twangy, or country-western influenced aesthetic.

It, like “Sand Time Machine,” is based around relatively gentle instrumentation—brushed percussion, a fiddle, and the cascades of the pedal steel, along with Awh’s rhythmically strummed acoustic guitar. And it, much like “Going For Oysters,” as well as a few other moments on the album, is written with an impressive blend of both specificity and ambiguity, as Awh reflects on her teenage romance, and how her attitude about love, or being within a relationship, has impacted who she is now (in her mid-20s, I believe.)

“When I was 17, I had my lover in a headlock,” she begins, with a line that is so vivid, and matter-of-fact, that it does make one think about how they might have acted around a high school partner. “He tried to melt my heart but I was so inconsistent,” she continues. “Now, I’m older, and I don’t know why I’m still so distant.”

The further Awh wades out into “Downtown Sucks,” the deeper in to a sense of regret and melancholy she gets, with lines arriving before each chorus like, “You sound so sad when you call—you say the city makes you feel so small,” and then later, “You could give up and go home, but would that make you feel any less alone?” 

And it is within the chorus where Awh returns to the perhaps unshakable nature of her teenage self, at least when it comes to interpersonal relationships—“Could I be the cause?,” she asks. “You say it’s not my fault but you look at me like I let you down. When you look at me, I feel like I’m 17,” she exclaims, before reaching a kind of hard truth. “I can’t grow up for you now.”

Love is like an hourglass with no bottom. 

And it is within “Downtown Sucks”’ second verse where the other very plaintive line about love, or what love is like, can be found. “You say when you’re in love, you’re alright with dropping everything. Sometimes, it makes me feel like I don’t know what loving means.”

It, like a number of the reflections found within the songs on Good Game Baby, doesn’t provide Awh, or us, as listeners, with any kind of resolve, or an answer. Just a realizations to try and reconcile with, and ideas about love, and how those may or may not fall into, depending on how sentimental and earnest you are, how you feel about love, and loving someone.

*

You got a new job, and it’s important.

And I found myself, somewhat recently, in a similar position as to where I was at this time, both last year, and this time the year before that. Describing the circumstances as being “between jobs,” is generous, and errs on the side of a kind of understanding and patience that others might have with me, or be willing to show me, but I do not often have with myself.

You start a new job. It doesn’t work. You start a new job. It doesn’t last long. You start a new job. It’s unsustainable, for whatever reason. You start a new job. You hope.

But, for five years, I worked in the same place, and it was good until it wasn’t. And because you spend so much of your day, and your week, within the workplace, you find yourself, as I did, cultivating and fostering workplace friendships. 

And when someone leaves the workplace, and moves on to something else, or, in my case, moves on to four months of spiraling at home, trying to pull myself out of a terribly depressive state, you find that maintaining those friendships with your former co-workers, however close you might have thought they were within the confines of your shared days at work, isn’t easy. 

It’s not impossible. 

But it’s also not guaranteed that those relationships will continue—certainly, one should not expect that they can continue as they did when you saw the person for upwards of eight hours a day, sometimes five days a week, but it does, ultimately, become a challenge to remain in touch, and find the right ways and right times to remain in touch, and you may, despite your best efforts, just lose whatever connections you might have had.

You got a new job, and it’s important.

After initially reading about Awh and Bats on For The Rabbits in the early part of 2022, sitting in a sun-soaked booth in a coffee shop, the first song that I played, which wound up being one of my favorite songs of that year, is the first song off of Blue Cabinet, “New Job,” where Awh, over a slow motion, somber indie-rock leaning tumble, laments about the potential disruption to a friendship when said friend has taken a new job, which might, in a sense, take that friend away from her.

“You got a new job, and it’s important,” Awh sings, and at times howls, sadly in the chorus to the song. “You’ve got responsibilities that you can’t ignore. You’ve got the world coming down on your shoulders.”

And I come back to this song, I guess, and the idea of workplaces and workplace friends, and how we try to sustain those relationships when you no longer have that one thing in common, and how jobs themselves, and your availability, or your capacity during a day, or at the end of a day, do run the risk of disrupting the dynamic of a friendship, or at least the dynamic as you knew it. 

And I come back to this song, I guess, and the idea of sustaining relationships, when I have started a new job, because it does inevitably change some things—maybe change is the wrong word. It alters. And the alterations require effort when wishing to make the time, and keep the connections.

I come back to this because, as I move further and further away from the workplace connections that were, at one time, important to me when we were all within the same space, day in and day out, I understand that I am guilty of being the one who has not made the time, or kept the connections.

I come back to this because, and, I mean, if you will allow me, 4,550 words in, to break the fourth wall, because I have, in the past—within the last year, certainly, written not at length about this, but enough to understand that it is becoming, along with a few other things I find myself writing into what could be just a record review, a recurring theme, but over the last year and a half, maybe even longer if I am being honest with myself, found myself on the receiving end of a very, very slow friendship fade that was, at one time, unexpected, though, maybe, again, if I am being honest with myself it shouldn’t have come as a surprise at all—regardless, either way, it is disappointing.

A friend from work who became a friend outside of work, and then we no longer worked together—and slowly, the connection became something that was more difficult to sustain until it seemed like it was no longer truly sustainable because it appeared there was not effort coming from both sides.

Someone that you could talk with for a long time then becomes someone whom you haven’t actually had a conversation with of any depth or real length to speak of in nearly half a year. 

I come back to this because of something my best friend said to me when, at the end of 2022, I was writing about “New Job” for my “year-end” piece on the songs I liked that year and asked her about her experiences maintaining workplace friendships when one, or both, parties no longer worked together.

“It is never really the same when you aren’t spending all day together,” she told me. 

It never really is the same.

I come back to this because we can and often do make them look effortless, and sometimes I can seem like it is easy, or that you aren’t asking for too much for someone to make space for you in their lives, but the truth is that interpersonal relationships can and often are difficult—and I come back to this because the melancholy and longing for a different and perhaps better or more innocence time that coursed throughout “New Job” is something that does course throughout a lot of the songs on Good Game Baby—the kind of grappling with how challenging these relationships (platonic, romantic, etc.) can be, how that makes us feel, and what that means, even though there is no resolve to be found here, really.

I come back to this because, like myself, Awh is often subtly self-deprecating, or at the very least, regularly sells herself short, in her songwriting—maybe not the most endearing quality one can have, but it is a quality that I have had for a bulk of my adult life, regardless. And it is that deprecation that is front and center in “Are You Like Me?” found just after the halfway point on the album, and is truly one of the most thought-provoking, compelling, and utterly stunning songs of this collection.

From the moment it begins, “Are You Like Me?” is somber—lyrically, you’ll find not long after Awh begins singing that it is one of the sadder or at least more melancholic songs within the record, but tonally, also, you can hear a more downcast nature in the cleanly strummed guitar progression that it opens with, before the rest of the instruments shuffle in. And something that does make it a high-water mark on Good Game Baby is that is quite different in its affect than any of the other songs included—there is a dreamy, swaying kind of nature to it that is not present elsewhere in the album, and with the steady, crisp sounding rhythm, additional layer of shimmering lead guitar, and a tambourine clattering underneath it, there is a hint of Mazzy Star that you can hear as the momentum gains.

In compliment, rather than contrast, Awh’s lyrics are also incredibly downcast and contemplative, sounding right at home, floating on top of the robust yet mournful aesthetic.

“You drove to my house and said ‘I’m wondering are you like me?’,” an off-stage character, and the antagonist to Awh asks within the song's opening lines, to which she replies, “I said I’m not like anyone.” And, within a few more lines into the song, the self-deprecating, lonely, and somber feelings quickly rise to the surface within some of the more impressive, or at least arresting, lines from the album’s entirety. “I am not like you,” she continues. “‘Cause I’m built for drinking and ruining lives when I drink.” 

Then, later—“I am a knife people use to carve off little bits of themselves from the whole,” Awh reflects. “But I wish I was something more understandable—softer and safer to hold.”

And there is a difficulty, I think, that a lot of us have, or, at least, I have, with receiving and accepting not “compliments,” exactly, but more of a kindness, or a tender kind of affection. Like when someone sees something good in you, that you may not see or understand within yourself, it’s hard to find the grace to say thank you, or be in any kind of agreement.

Awh, throughout “Are You Like Me?” is reluctant at best to accept that affection, or assurance, though even within the reluctance, the lyrics allude to her knowing she could benefit from it. “I’m cosmically sorry for everything, baby,” she quietly sings after the first chorus. “I wish I did not do you harm,” before adding, just a little while later, “I am not like you in any capacity, and you love to tell me I’m not a disaster.”

The chorus itself, much like other places across Good Game Baby, relies on Awh’s ability to craft a hyper-specific moment with just a few words—similar to the imagery of fingers on a collarbone that she uses earlier in the album, there is another moment of intense intimacy she depicts here. “When you press your forehead into my temple and breathe little lies on my cheek,” she says. “Saying, are you like me? I think you might be like me.”

The song itself is stunning, gorgeous, and impressive in how it slowly, and deliberately unfolds—complete with a searing guitar solo that connects the first half to the second, but there are these incredible moments of tension and release, too—in the bridge, when the song reaches this enormous, somber swoon, with Awh, half in exasperation and half in desperation, repeating the phrase, “Everybody’s tried,” and, after the music swells, the band allows things to gradually recede, giving Awh a place of quiet to bring the song to the end. 

Though, in the end, she leaves us with two questions that go unanswered. We do never find out if she, truly, is like this other person, and, regardless of if she is, or is not, why would that be such a bad thing.

*

Bats, admittedly, began as a solo outlet for Awh, with it slowly shifting into a proper “band” in the time between her debut under the name, There’s A River Up High, and the release of Blue Cabinet. Good Game Baby, across its nine songs, is a bold statement for Jess Awh as a songwriter and band leader, as well as a huge step forward for Bats as a dynamic act. 

Throughout Good Game Baby, and it is subtle, and maybe gets lost a little in the shuffle of highs and lows and tonal shifts, but often, the songs do not run into each other so much as they are connected, slightly, through even the faintest threads—the most noticeable instance is when the guitar feedback at the end of “Going for Oysters” stops, there is no breathing room between it, and the arrival of the tape hiss and count off at the beginning of “Downtown Sucks.” It isn’t a seamless album, or something that gives the illusion of a “live” or “in the room” kind of feeling, but it does create a kind of unrelenting momentum, and is a small, but genuinely interesting production trick that creates these fleeting but connecty moments. 

I often arrive at a point where, in writing about music that relies somewhat heavily on personal lyricism, I describe it as a reflection on the human condition. Good Game Baby is no different—it is an impressive collection of songs that are similar enough in overall tone to create a real sense of cohesion in sound, but are unique enough to showcase the growing, expansive nature of Awh’s songwriting. Her lyrics are vague enough, intentionally so, at times to keep us wondering about the additional elements within each vignette that she is not sharing, but are also frank, honest, and ultimately rather charming, even when her reflections are terribly heartbreaking. 

A beautiful, wondrous, wildly accessible, and at times, an unpredictable album that lures you in immediately, and then slowly opens itself up more and more through subsequent listens.  

Good Game Baby is a self-released album available now on CD and cassette, through Awh herself.