Fruit Bats - The Ruminant Band

Eric Jackson’s Fruit Bats have managed to fly just beneath the radar for years, even as his moonlighting role with similar-in-spirit labelmates The Shins has seen his other band skirt their way delicately along the edges of the mainstream. In some ways it’s easy to understand why – whilst James Mercer’s grounding humanity and gritty line in self-depreciating humour lend his songwriting a more obvious wide appeal, Jackson’s musings are less heavy on black humour, dwelling instead on the tiny nuances of positivity that make each day that bit more bearable: witness him “blow the tiny spider off your wrist” on ‘Beautiful Morning Light’. Even as the music that backs both writers shares certain fundamental similarities, The Shins’ deft fusion of ‘we’re all fucked’ negativity to an almost comically positive melodic framework does a neat job of summing up the prevailing atmosphere of the millennium thus far.

So far, so neat discussion of Mercer’s appealing aspects. But what of the Fruit Bats? Their fourth album for Sub Pop, The Ruminant Band, may not be likely to buck any trends and expose them to wider mainstream appeal, but it’s an absorbing and pretty piece of work nonetheless. At times calling to mind fellow folk-explorer Jason Molina’s Magnolia Electric Company in its frazzled slide guitar and country-fried strum, Jackson manages to summon the spirits of a couple of hundred years of music tradition to craft an album that certainly doesn’t match up to the world we’ve been living in for the past decade. It’s almost as though the last few years of fear, war and Dubya never happened – a kind of sublime escapism that doesn’t so much try and avoid a difficult subject as much as simply ignore that it happened at all.

Its unabashed lightheartedness provides both The Ruminant Band’s greatest appeal and its greatest drawback. Jackson’s songwriting is at its best when at its most intimate – the keening acoustic strum of the aforementioned ‘Beautiful Morning Light’, as he escapes with a lover to the shelter of a tree’s branches at dawn, or the gorgeous lo-fi piano led atmospheres of closer ‘Flamingo’. Yet in the same way as relentless negativity can grate over time, over the course of an entire record Jackson’s childlike wonder becomes a little wearing. It’s hard not to mull over music’s role, at least to these ears. Just as the arrival of autumn triggers a change in listening habits to suit mood and season, so the rollercoaster of emotions the world throws at its inhabitants on a daily basis sometimes demands something a little more appreciative of life’s darker aspects. Not too much – but a little; it’s a delicate balancing act.

By Rory Gibb