Numb Bats are a local, three-piece band and its members describe their music as a 90s revival.
It’s a fitting description, though you can also hear lots of different influences in their songs, including grunge, surf, pop and even 70s punk with an added grittiness and resilience reflective of the desert.
The Show invited the three women that make up Numb Bats, Emily Hobeheidar, Sophie Opich and Mo Neuharth to KJZZ for a Tiny Desert Concert and a conversation about their music. They started things off with the song “I Want You.”
Numb Bats also played their song, “The Other Angry Woman.” They’re playing Saturday at Time Out Lounge in Tempe.
Full conversation
EMILY HOBEHEIDAR: Someone wrote a review about us, saying that when they listen to our songs, it reminds them of being abandoned on the side of a road in a swamp, no cellphone or no weapons in the complete darkness.
STEVE GOLDSTEIN: No weapons. That sends her the same condition there.
SOPHIE OPICH: I think what she was trying to say is that it's intense.
GOLDSTEIN: Mo, how has the music evolved as the band has changed?
MO NEUHARTH: I definitely think we started off a lot less complex. I hadn't started playing the drums. I started when we started this project. So I mean, just technicality and musicianship has obviously evolved for the better.
GOLDSTEIN: Yeah. Sophie, what about lyrics? How important are lyrics to you? Because there are a lot of people who pick up, they come to love a singer or a band or a group because of lyrics, and others just love how it sounds. So at this point, how important are lyrics?
OPICH: Oh, I think they're important. Emily, Emily and I are both poets. Everyone's a poet. I'm not a poet. I think when I listen to music, I like a song to be fulfilling on all levels. I like when the lyrics are cool, when the music is cool, when the beat is cool, and so I think it's equally important for us. We don't take it too seriously, but it's cool having three heads when we approach lyric writing.
HOBEHEIDAR: I don't know. I'm a big fan of when lyrics are not so mysterious and they're just straightforward, and they pretty much, you listen to it, and you know what they're talking about. And I feel like you can connect easier to a song like that.
GOLDSTEIN: And mood has so much to do with kind of when you write the lyrics, what sort of mood people are in. And for me, I mean, having lived through as long as I have, I have a totally different mood when it's sunny as opposed to when it's overcast. And does that affect you guys, when you're playing your music or getting ready to come up with a song?
HOBEHEIDAR: It's funny, because most of our songs were written during summer time, so.
OPICH: But that's because you just stay inside, you know, and you just lock yourself up in the house.
GOLDSTEIN: Hope the air conditioning works.
HOBEHEIDAR: Our practice space in the summer is pretty brutal in the basement walls. It's hot.
GOLDSTEIN: You guys have no, OK, not even a ceiling fan or something like that?
NEUHARTH: I have a little tiny fan that is called a Vornado.
OPICH: But it just hits one person, we trade off.
GOLDSTEIN: So how long can you stay down in that space?
HOBEHEIDAR: A long time.
OPICH: Yeah we recorded our album down there, actually. And that was, yeah, in the middle of summer. It was maybe July, was when we did it, and we chugged through it, water bottles, tank tops, popsicles.
GOLDSTEIN: Well I wonder. I'm still into that creative process. How do you think that affects what the final product was then? I mean, as my brain gets older, which is getting very old, you know, I wake up in the morning, there'll be a song in my head that I don't think I've heard for weeks, and it might even influence the way I go about the rest of the day.
OPCICH: I remember when we, this summer, when we were recording our album, Emily was listening to a lot of kinds of, like ‘90s grunge. They, like, you know, like Pixies and Nirvana, and I was listening to, like the Beach Boys. And so I'm wanting to do all these, you know, like pretty vocal harmonies. And we're practicing harmonizing, we're really practicing the vocals. And then she's wanting to just make it just really grungy. So then those things come together, and then it's cool.
If you’re in a band or know of one you’d like to hear on air, send us a note at [email protected].
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