Fruit Bats: The Landfill (Hummingbird Sage splatter vinyl) LP

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 a phrase, are slow growers, given life on albums that encompass long stretches of time and memory. Last year's "Baby Man" changed that - he disallowed himself from referring to material he'd been working on before laying the album down, utilizing the morning pages technique of stream-of-consciousness, observational songwriting which flowed directly into his afternoon recording 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. Within weeks, he was back in a studio, this time with his band, with whom Johnson has spent over a decade building Fruit Bats into one of the most in-demand live acts in indie rock. Listening to "The Landfill", it’s not hard to understand why: simply put, this band smokes. Most of the songs on "The Landfill" mark themselves immediately as some of the best in Eric D. Johnson's ever-expanding songbook, seekers and anthems alike. It's the most daunting peak he's scaled yet, musically or lyrically: a swashbuckling set of full-band jammers couldn't be more honest and open-hearted about his hopes and anxieties, his dreams and failures, what's passed and what will come to pass, were it just him, his guitar, and the listener.