Allow me to burst your bubble: Fruit Bats have found a new drummer, 11 days after Pitchfork deemed their ISO newsworthy. His name is Ron Lewis, and by day he's a cheesemonger. (Folks, you can't make this stuff up.) But buck up, would-be Bonhams: There are more exciting outfits to get down with, bands that change tempo, use odd meter, leave space for rip-roarin' tom rolls. Fruit Bats, not so much; they traffic in power-pop without the crunch and speed-- or, in brainchild Eric Johnson's ambitious mind, the hypothetical link-up of Holy Modal Rounders and Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac.
Ron Lewis, I hereby charge you, sir, with making these fine songwriters less fucking facile. I want you to bring a brick of oozy stilton to rehearsal and let that sucker stink up these folk-poppers' cleanly confections.
If you want a tutorial in how to render well-written songs flaccid and boring, pick up Spelled in Bones. Critics bray about "trimming the fat" but that's specious; fat is good! Fat is French! Fruit Bats could use some flab; even the title track, a groggy wisp of a ballad that should drag on ad infinitum, wraps up in under four minutes. Where are the tumescent guitar peals, the reverb-drowned vocals, the bombastic drums? There is no two-part coda. Worse, no trumpet fanfare. Mr. Lewis, you have a tough road to hoe.
But you're ideal for the job. Johnson retains his affinity for spic-and-span 70s pop-- the kind that put newspaper in the bass drum, sat Elton John at the keys, and was tooled on a microbiotic level. But what John and the Macs (both Fleetwood and P. __Cartney) lacked in daring, they more than made up for in cheese. So it's to the Fruit Bats' credit that they chose a replacement skins-hitter who actually peddles the stuff.
Spelled in Bones doesn't achieve Rounders-Rumours synthesis, but it does successfully update arena fro-yo by excising the coke-fed navel-gazing. Where their forebears slung self-absorbed musings from a druggy maw, Johnson's words harmonize with the Bats' docility.
Fruit Bats previously got pleasant with a pair of sleepy Brian Deck-produced slabs, 2001's Echolocation and 2003's Sub Pop debut Mouthfuls. But Spelled in Bones, their most polished effort, teeters near soporific. And that's a shame, because it houses some of the band's best songs. Though the consistency of instrumentation, volume, and tempo invite the ear to wander, there are jags of awesomeness. Amid so much swooshing fluidity, the closing vocal repetition on "Silent Life" is almost defiant. Listless ballad "TV Waves" is jolted by a chugging, hi-hat driven pickup, which, beneath melty guitar peals (finally), gives the illusion of double-time. Johnson's vox are polite and low-key mostly, which is why his sudden unblanketing of a sultry falsetto on "Born in the '70s" is both a much-needed spark and a tease.
Instead of paying homage to the megastars of a bygone era-- whose sound comes naturally but whose spirit remains evasive-- Fruit Bats should focus on where they fit in among active analogues. For Pete's sake, they're on Sup Pop. With a loosened-up approach Johnson could put himself in a league with A.C. Newman and labelmates the Shins. As for newcomer Lewis: Bring it, kid. Better that the new pup shit all over the rug than hide behind the couch all day.
