The Landfill

Description

The Midwest, and more specifically Eric D. Johnson's home region, is a vast plain. Driving across it on the highway, you see towns and villages appear on the horizon, but you don't notice the other human constructions that dot the landscape, hill after hill, built from the waste of the past: the landfills. Some of these hills offer great sledding slopes, parks, and trails. Others turn organic waste into compost. The Landfill is something else entirely: a mountain that dominates the landscape dear to Johnson. Over his 25-year career under the name Fruit Bats, Eric D. Johnson's work is the result of patience and constant refinement. His songs come to life on albums that embrace long periods of his life and memories. The recording of Baby Man changed the game: the artist forbade himself from referring to the tracks he was working on before the album's recording, using the stream-of-consciousness technique, creating a striking testament to Johnson's talent as a singer-songwriter. Baby Man, and the particular attention paid to his voice and instrument, freed something in Johnson while writing a new album with a full band, and a few weeks later, he was back in the studio, this time with his group: David Dawda (bass), Josh Mease (guitars, synthesizer), Frank LoCrasto (piano, synthesizer), and Kosta Galanopoulos (drums). With these musicians, Johnson spent over a decade making Fruit Bats one of the most in-demand live bands in indie rock. Listening to The Landfill, it's easy to see why: this band is simply exceptional. The Landfill is Fruit Bats' most live album. By reducing the number of tracks that usually make up a song with the full band, the dreamlike and psychedelic dimension of their sound is more intense than ever. Time and space melt into the sublime as the band coalesces around Johnson's airy voice on "That Goddamn Sun". Finding a subtle balance between ecstatic romance and melancholy, "Think Aboutcha" sits between the sublime and the tragic, between the E Street Band and Paul McCartney, with a lightness tinged with an extraordinary gravity, while "Perhaps We’re a Storm" charges headlong into the unknown. All these songs immediately stand out as some of the best in Eric D. Johnson's ever-growing repertoire. It's the most impressive peak he has reached so far, musically and lyrically: a set of fiery tracks, performed by a full band, could not be more sincere and authentic about his hopes and anxieties, his dreams and failures, his past and future, as if it were just him, his guitar, and the listener.