Fruit Bats

Freeindie.com has yet to disappoint me. About a week ago the website featured a band called the Fruit Bats. The name intrigued me as did the brief description: "[Eric Johnson writes slow paced, 70's styled pop folk songs, and sings them in his shy yet solid voice. You may already know Johnson from his work with The Shins."

The golden word was spoken. The Shins. As several of my last few posts signify, I've been listening to the Shins close to 24-7 lately it seems. This is saying a lot as they only have three LPs totalling in at a mere hour and 49 minutes. (Newly discovered random Shins fact: the Shins' drummer Jesse Sandoval admitted to taking drum lessons in order to keep up with James Mercer's increasingly complex songwriting. This either praises Mercer's songwriting skills (which I mostly agree with) or disses this guy's drumming. Or both.)

So this random guy has done work with the Shins. Interesting. This gives me an excuse to add these four free and legal songs to my already-too-large music collection (I've recently reduced it to just about 8,500 songs).

I was distracted with who knows what after I downloaded the group of songs, so I remembered I'd done it a couple of days later when I ran into them on my Never Played list that I'm slowly listening through (I'm now down to only 834 songs (I started at around 4,000)). I hit play. A cousin of the Shins emerged from my speakers. It was bliss.

Now listening to these songs once again, it hits me that they definitely have a Shins sound to them, but Johnson's voice differs from James Mercer's. In fact, I knew from the original first few seconds of hearing them that the voice sounded familiar, and I've finally discovered why. He sounds slightly like Brendan Benson. Completely different style of music. Thus, my analysis of the Fruit Bats is that it sounds like Brendan Benson singing the Shins. With some Pet Sounds-esque Beach Boys noises going on (Currently disappointed in taste of my parents in their youth: I discovered that neither one of them owned the Beach Boys'Pet Sounds album as a vinyl when it first came out. In fact they never owned it at all. Widely known to be one of the very best albums of the century, and neither of them who were blessed to live during its legacy, ever enjoyed it in its original form. Tragedy.) at times.

So I suppose I could very easily become a Fruit Bats fan. But much more so after what I discovered in my preliminary research of this indie band.

I wanted to figure out what this Johnson bloke added to the Shins, and I discover that I myself have seen him perform and been within about 20 feet of his presence (proof: photo above. Johnson is playing the acoustic guitar to the right of James Mercer). I amaze myself sometimes. He's the random fifth guy that I was wondering who he was. I had known that the Shins were originally a four-man group prior to seeing them at the Crystal Ballroom in February, but I'd also heard they'd had an extra guy touring and even contributing to the studio lately. So, connection made. I'm still not exactly clear as to whether Johnson is going to be a permanent member or not, but I suppose time will inform. Regardless, he's going to be keeping up with his solo project, the Fruit Bats, and supposedly putting out a new album at some point.

LB

Currently listening to: the Fruit Bats

Currently finishing reading: the last 6 pages of "Perfect From Now On." I'm rather disappointed with this book. I'll review it on here at some point once I cap off these final pages.