Fruit Bats - Tripper

The preoccupations that Eric D. Johnson chews over on Fruit Bats’ fifth record are summed up pretty much perfectly on Tripper’s cover: a small band of antelope stand on a sun-dappled prairie, a dirt track disappearing over a low hill below a big sky, cumulus roiling gigantic away towards the horizon. It’s so striking that Sub Pop have been thoughtful enough to blow it up times five on the accompanying fold-out poster-cum-lyric-sheet – normally these things aren’t worth commenting on, but if ever an image said ‘freedom’, this is it.

On 2009’s excellent The Ruminant Band, Johnson threw the emphasis of his one-time solo project onto the talents of Fruit Bats’ full band; with Tripper he’s wound it back a bit, biting off harder, richer, but lonelier fare. Unlike the invented mythology of fellow indie folksters Blitzen Trapper, or the meandering musings of Vetiver’s Andy Cabic (whose longtime producer Thom Monahan has done a stellar job here), Johnson spins rangy yarns of characters seeking a path into the wide blue yonder.

‘Tony The Tripper’ sets the score: life led on the fly and chance meetings with random sorts, over a simple propulsive riff and Johnson’s Robert Plant-ish cries. These ideas are also covered on ‘Heart Like An Orange’, or the organ-powered ditty ‘Dolly’, an equally organ-powered persona talking the title lass into hitting the road… The flip-side to giving free-rein to feet with a mind of their own – expulsion to the “fucked up world” – is charted in a surprisingly effective Bee Gees falsetto in ‘The Banishment Song’. But as he sings in late album highlight ‘Wild Honey’, “to own nobody / to owe nobody” is, for some, an end in itself.

For Johnson freedom comes at a price, but it’s one that is ultimately worth paying. Much like this excellent record.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 425, August 15th 2011