Landfill [LP]

The midwest, particularly the part of the midwest Eric D. Johnson hails from, is a largely flatexpanse. Zipping through it on the highway, you'll see cities and towns rise up in the distance,but blink and you'll miss other man-made rejoinders to horizontal living dotting the landscape,hill after hill, built from the refuse of the past: landfills. Some of these hills make for greatsledding spots, parks, and trails. Others turn organic waste into compost. The Landfill issomething else entirely: a mountain dominating the landscape of Johnson's heart.Over the course of his now 25-year career under the Fruit Bats moniker, most of Eric D.Johnson's output has been the product of patience and fine-tuning. His songs, to borrow aphrase, are slow growers, given life on albums that encompass long stretches of time andmemory. Baby Man changed that - he disallowed himself from referring to material he'dbeen working on before laying the album down, utilizing the morning pages technique ofstream-of-consciousness, observational songwriting which flowed directly into his afternoonrecording sessions. It was both a breathtaking document of Johnson's skill as a singer-songwriter and an unvarnished account of the two weeks in which he recorded the album.Baby Man's closeness to Johnson's heart and the close attention to his voice and instrument it'sminimalist-maximalist ethos required uncorked something in him as he wrote towards a newfull band effort. "That session was over," he explains, "but there was way more to explore. Iliked the immediacy of it, and I wanted to see how that would translate into a full-band FruitBats record." Within weeks, he was back in a studio, this time with his band - David Dawda(bass), Josh Mease (guitars, synth), Frank LoCrasto (piano, synth), and Kosta Galanopoulos(drums) - with whom Johnson has spent over a decade building Fruit Bats into one of themost in-demand live acts in indie rock. Listening to The Landfill, it's not hard to understand why:simply put, this band smokes.Producing the initial recording sessions in Washington's Bear Creek Studios, Johnson set outto capture "the sound of this band I constantly marvel at, the feeling of being in a room withmusicians you love and trust enough to let them cook." They laid most of it down on thefloor - no click tracks, no comped vocals, and minimal overdubs, with frequent collaboratorThom Monahan returning to provide additional production and The Landfill's final mix. "It'show we do things with my other band, Bonny Light Horseman, and I was curious to see howit would work with Fruit Bats," Johnson notes. "It's both a very personal record, and my mostcollaborative to date."It's also the most live a Fruit Bats record has been since 2009's The Ruminant Band, and inparing back the number of tracks that typically layer a full-band song, the psychedelic,technicolor dreaminess of their sound is more vivid than ever. Time and space melt into thesublime as the band gels around Johnson's hazy croon on "That Goddamn Sun," stretching outto accommodate him as he trips from California to North Carolina. In striking a balancebetween ecstatic romance and melancholia, "Think Aboutcha" occupies the blissful-but-doomed intersection of the E Street Band and Paul McCartney, playful but playing for stakesthat are larger than life, while "Perhaps We're a Storm" charges headlong into the unknown.All of these songs - most of the songs on The Landfill, in fact - mark themselvesimmediately as some of the best in Eric D. Johnson's ever-expanding songbook, seekers andanthems alike. It's the most daunting peak he's scaled yet, musically or lyrically: aswashbuckling set of full-band jammers couldn't be more honest and open-hearted about hishopes and anxieties, his dreams and fa