Send "Fruit Bats " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Ppmatters |
 Perhaps it is unfair that Eric Johnson and his band Fruit Bats continue to get overshadowed by other Sub Pop bands—before it was the Shins (whom he played with) and now it’s Fleet Foxes—or maybe it’s just further evidence of the arbitrary nature of buzz and popularity. Either way, the band’s music hasn’t suffered over its ten-year run. Fruit Bats’ last record, 2009’s The Ruminant Band was their best to date, a perfect distillation of their folky, sunburst sound. It was as much classic rock as it was modern pop, and Johnson’s ever-detailed lyrics began to dig deeper into more intricate narratives.If that album was about reminiscing about the past, then Tripper is very much about seizing the moment. Beginning with a chance encounter with the title character on the opening track, “Tony the Tripper”, the album weaves a narrative of people trying to get away, or trying to find a new home, or just trying to get lost between those two poles. Johnson has always had this sort of wanderlust on his mind, but previous records found that wandering happening more in the head, in people trying to change their perception more than their place. Tripper is an album with a landscape and propulsion. It moves forward: sometimes ambling, sometimes stopping to take stock, but always heading to the next thing. As a next step itself in the band’s discography, Tripper is out on its own. At its base, it continues the dusty AM-gold vibe the other records achieved, but Johnson—who has of late begun to work on film scores—pushes himself to incorporate new layers on the record. After the band recorded all its parts, Eric Johnson holed up with producer Thom Monahan and began messing with synthesizers, adding less organic elements to mix up the textures. The resulting record, after its four warm-sounding predecessors, sounds decidedly cool. There’s a darkness hovering around these songs, and if they still ride on the bright tones of Johnson’s voice, they are unafraid to let clouds cover the shine from time to time. These new layers also make for songs that vary wildly in sound, so that the album is as adrift sonically as it is thematically. “So Long”, which may have been an acoustic chugger if Johnson wrote it a few years back, is a spacey dream-pop number, with cascading harps and airy effects swirling around. “Dolly” rides on a thin guitar riff and pump organ, and the space between the two makes the otherwise ultra-catchy tune a bit unsettling. Johnson’s new arrangement tricks also nicely complicate otherwise breezy numbers. “You’re Too Weird”—the album’s lead single—is a perfectly solid pop song. Guitars glide and Johnson’s high keen sways over the track, but it’s the ragged guitar solo in the middle and the ever-so-faint synths forcing their way into the mix that make the song stick. Similarly, “Heart Like an Orange” is great—a classic story of a person searching for feeling in a cold town—but the layers of guitar and keys that bleat and buzz over the song’s smooth melody hint nicely at those troublesome surroundings, which makes Johnson’s yearning voice all the more affecting....full text |
| Onethirtybpm |
| Fruit Bats singer/songwriter Eric Johnson and Sub Pop are at it again, pairing up for Tripper; a self-declared “bittersweet meditation on hitting the road, leaving the familiar behind and reinventing yourself.” After playing with The Shins on their last world tour, Johnson returned to the studio with vogue alt-folk producer Thom Monahan to record Fruit Bats’ 5th LP. Johnson gives Monahan some major props, crediting his producer’s “knowledge of Sonics and a Zen-like approach” for the album’s “deep, refined sound.” On up-tempo opener “Tony the Tripper,” a dreamy space echo penetrates Johnson’s emphatic acoustic strumming, as the singer introduces a cohort of deluded vagabonds and defective nobodies: “Tony the tripper and me / And the dude who thought he was my hero / And the Mayor of nowhere land / And the girl with the wanderin’ eye came a wanderin’ by.” As lithe piano lines give way to crisp electric guitar hooks, Johnson pitches in with lackadaisical ambivalence: “It was all under the dead palm tree / They left the rollin’ of one up to me / Knowin’ the world might end tomorrow an-eeeee-way!” “Tangie and Ray,” one of the LP’s “story songs” that has the instrumental section taking a back seat to Johnson’s narrative, chronicles a pilgrimage from the safety of home to “go rolling with the rubber tramps and see the last few mountain men.” But, like the characters in Fastball’s cautionary wanderlust-gone-awry tale “The Way,” the two kids pay dearly for failing to foresee that escaping hometown stasis also means forfeiting the security that we’ve taken for granted our entire lives: “Down in the dirt with the spineless animal and seeds / They live down in the dirt / Under the county sky and un-bro-ken can-oh-peeeee / They’re never go-innn’ home.” Leading off with a baroque harpsichord and vintage Chamberlin keyboard, “So Long” is a synthesizer laden cut about rural repression. Channeling Portland’s Blind Pilot, glistening xylophone and tranquil lyrics tie together “Shivering Fawn,” which spins as a pleasant, unassuming naturalistic track....full text |
| Bowlegsmusic |
| We quite liked the Fruit Bats’ 2009 album, ‘The Ruminant Band’. It was an easy-going piano and acoustic led sing-a-long, from the melancholic to the bright and breezy. It’s what main man Eric D. Johnson does best, and after a decade as The Fruit Bats we’d expect nothing less. And while ‘Tripper’ lyrically leans towards a more narrative based approach, musically it’s exactly as we expected – an easy-going piano and acoustic led sing-a-long, from the melancholic to the bright and breezy (are we repeating ourselves?). It opens with the acoustic rumblings of ‘Tony the Tripper’, a song that features Richard Swift and Avi from Avi Buffalo, with Johnson carrying the song with his inimitable whine and pitch-scrambling delivery. It’s the darker melodies, the minor chords and the less carefree attitude that spark the most memorable moments. ‘Tangie and Ray’ may have a tinkering piano and neatly compressed beat, but it also has a hint of sadness in Johnson’s vocal as it resides down in the dirt. And if the record falls back on some light-footed folk, as in ‘Shivering Fawn’, you can count on Johnson’s voice (double-tracked for moments here) to turn it inside out, making it a more interesting prospect than how it appears on paper. Admittedly he does throw in a few extras here. From the falsetto lines, tapping percussion and laid-back piano on ‘The Banishment Song’, to the surprisingly empty ‘Wild Honey’, the record hints at change, if never really taking a complete leap of faith....full text |
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