Album Review: Fruit Bats, ‘Baby Man’

Unrelenting in its spareness, Fruit Bats’ new album, Baby Man, strips away any pretense that the struggles of life can be addressed in glib cliches. Minimalist arrangements and introspective lyrics reveal the contours of Eric D. Johnson’s journeys in self-reflection. Every song features his searing vocals alone with a guitar or a piano.

The taut strums of “Let You People Down,” the album’s opening track, evoke the ragged indecisiveness of someone stuck between affirmation and despair. In this case, the singer decides not to shut the world out since he doesn’t want to “let you people down.” Haunting jazz piano chords open into the singer’s state of mind on “Two Thousand Four,” a reflection on a road trip and the lessons learned about human nature in the titular year. Gentle fingerpicking flows underneath Johnson’s vocals on “Stuck in My Head Again,” which could have been the album’s title. Droning synth and cascading piano on the title track mimic the singer’s birth and psychic growth, while jaunty riffs and strums deliver an ode to his rescue dog and the redemption it brings—“you saved us for a while”—on “Creature from the Wild.” The propulsive “Building a Cathedral” conveys the ambivalence of opening oneself to the world or closing oneself away from it, while sedate, jazz lounge piano notes and chords provides the atmospheric reflections on disappointment and personal transformation on the album’s closer “Year of the Crow.”

The contemplative nature of the music and lyrics on Baby Man echoes the elegant inertia of the words of Samuel Beckett: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

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Baby Man is available HERE.

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