Nostalgia it seems is making a comeback. Though of course it's never really been away. As the tagline on this blog from Nick Cave suggests, memory is utterly fundamental to us all. The prism through which we interact with and exist within the world.
If the point isn't clear, here comes Fruit Bats Gold Past Life to drive it home once and for all. As with similar albums of recent months, Weyes Blood's magnificent Titanic Rising and Drugdealer's slightly more workaday Raw Honey, it inhabits the early Seventies, almost suggesting it to be a lost golden age.
Which it's not of course. But for the duration of Gold Past Life Eric D. Johnson, (ostensibly the man behind the project) makes the illusion last. In order to do so he most obviously owes a huge debt to Harry Nilsson without whom it's difficult to imagine the album existing at all. The man's yearning, wistful spirit leaves fingerprints all over the scene of the crime.
Nilsson himself of course was also a shameless nostalgist. Johnson honours his memory. Most importantly, some of the songs on here are very good. So while never hitting the heights of Titanic Rising, Gold Past Life is a half hour well spent. Whether memories are made of this may be quite another question, but I like it, and if pressed would give it seven.
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