The Fruit Bats new record, The Pet Parade is a very good album which will do nothing but remind you of other records in your collection. I have no problem at all with that, especially when the record that results is one as good as this one. It has a warm nostalgic glow and is full of happy memories.
Fruit Bats have been around in various guises since the late Nineties and so they ought to know what they're doing by now. On the evidence of the first few tracks of The Pet Parade, they clearly do. This warm, immersive record took me back to reflective Bob after his motorcyle accident, early Seventies Neil Young, the country leaning Triffids and more and more I found, as the record spun on Spotify, to one of my own particular favourites, John Lennon's Lost Weekend buddy, Harry Nilsson.
Eric D. Johnson, the main man behind the Fruit Bats collective, is clearly in the mood to kick back and relax at this point of his career and life. This makes for a gentle, undemanding listen not a million years away from some of the stuff that Kevin Morby has come up with in recent years, minus the residual anger and self-doubt.
Johnson seems in little doubt of where he's going. There's much staring at the heavens in wonder at where we stand in relation to the scheme of things we find ourselves in and Johnson provides a still centre to the turning world. These are utterly assured songs that burst into gorgeous flowing choruses, not one's that will disturb your universe but remind to stop worrying about wherever that might be.
Occasionally there's a blissful swoon, and Johnson points out that ultimately we're all on our own, but he does so in such a flippant, throwaway manner that you know that this bleak conclusion is not the absolute truth either. There all kinds of glass half empty musings on this record but the Fruit Bats musical recipe is such a sugared pill that you barely notice.
Apparently Supertramp are also on Johnson's influence list, and I can believe that listening to this, and actually don't mind it at all given that Fruit Bats are clearly emotionally and lyrically a great deal more enlightened than that particular band. No 'take a look at my girlfriend,' nonsense here.
This is a peach of a record, coming out on the first weekend of March, which frankly had no end of them. Open your arms to the warm loving embrace of The Pet Parade. You won't regret it.
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