Song Review - Fruit Bats - 'Rips Me Up'
REVIEW BY: HARRY HARTNEY
Eric D. Johnson and his indie-folk music project, ‘Fruit Bats’, have continued a 20th anniversary year releasing bonanza with a new track titled ‘Rips Me Up’. The single comes after the band put out both a cover of The Smashing Pumpkins album ‘Siamese Dream’, as well as their own ‘The Pet Parade’, respectively coming out in August and March, 2021. ‘Rips Me Up’ is the first release from Johnson’s next endeavour, ‘Sometimes a Cloud is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001-2021)’, which comes out on January 28, 2022, a collection of tracks that have not had the chance to be a part of albums come and gone over the past twenty years. ‘Rips Me Up’ was an omission from ‘The Pet Parade’.
Produced by Josh Kaufman of Merge Records, the song opens with gentle guitar picking and a reverb-heavy synth soaring above in the backdrop. This is interrupted by Johnson’s nasally, almost distant voice that compliments the instruments that follow his melody. His vocal inflections call back to that of John Lennon, and the Beatlesque attributes of the track are furthered by guitar riffs and licks that seem to be pulled straight from the handbook of George Harrison. Laidback drum fills contribute to the acid-fuelled road trip feel of the track.
Johnson is aided by a choir of backing vocals, which really provide the chorus a strong kick of chilled passion. This relaxed vibe is accentuated by the psychedelic mixing of Kaufman, which heavily isolates guitars, and fits Johnson’s vocals in seamlessly with the backing ensemble. As such, the track delivers an ambience associated with an obscure 70s artists’ hidden gem.
The lyrics, while not ground-breaking, lend a certain familiarity that one cannot help but feel a peaceful kind of melancholy . Probably most poignant are that of the chorus, on which Johnson writes of the torn emotionality of a break-up and lingering love: “Every time I think of you it rips me up/And floating in the ether, I ran, outdone”.
A really solid track that extends an excitement towards the release of ‘Sometimes a Cloud is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001-2021)’ in 2022, ‘Rips Me Up’ heads off an exceptionally strong year for Eric D. Johnson. The ‘Fruit Bats’ single is now available on all streaming platforms.
Fruit Bats announce 20th anniversary 2-LP compilation, share brand-new track “Rips Me Up”
On January 28 2022, Merge will release Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001–2021), a two-disc collection that tracks the history of Fruit Bats from its earliest days to right now. Listen to the soulful and strutting “Rips Me Up,” a brand-new song that opens the album, and pre-order Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud on deluxe pink and violet swirl double vinyl today.
Here’s Fruit Bats ringleader Eric D. Johnson on “Rips Me Up”:
Every once and a while, you'll record a song for an album and that song feels really great but also vibes like an emotional and/or sonic outlier from the others. Here's one of those from The Pet Parade sessions. Hopefully this gets put somewhere in the pantheon of “trying to be a better man” songs. I'm not sure why I wrote it. I must have been feeling uneasy that day. Oh, also: yeah, I know it's always weird when an artist puts a new song on a “greatest hits” album. But since I've never really truly had a “hit,” I figured I could break that rule here and put it on this new compilation and retrospective. Joe Russo and Nathan Vanderpool and Josh Mease and Josh Kaufman are on here. They are all wonderful. Enjoy this little ripper.
Thoughtfully compiled by Johnson himself, this 2-LP collection is split in two distinct halves. Set in reverse chronological order, the first disc cherry-picks from Fruit Bats’ official releases, including fan favorites—“Humbug Mountain Song” from 2016’s Absolute Loser and “The Bottom of It” from his 2019 Merge debut Gold Past Life—alongside some of Johnson’s more personal choices like “Glass in Your Feet” from his 2001 debut Echolocation. “I was 25 when I made that record,” Johnson remembers. “I was even younger than that when I wrote that song. I think I hadn’t yet learned to write from the heart. I was trying to create a sound. It wasn’t even so much about the song at that point.”
If the first disc of this set is “the collection that you buy for your friend that’s Fruit Bats–curious,” according to Johnson, the second disc is for longtime fans that want a deeper dive into Fruit Bats lore. To put this half of Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud together, Johnson dug into several hard drives’ worth of material. “Much of it is horribly unlistenable,” he says with a laugh. “I wouldn’t necessarily say there was a treasure trove. At least to my ears because I might be my own worst critic.”
Considering the wonders that Johnson did uncover for this set, there may be a call for a further mining of the archives. Included here are lovely early versions of “Rainbow Sign” and “The Old Black Hole,” recorded to a Tascam 4-track just as Fruit Bats was becoming a reality. There’s also a rambling take on the Steve Miller Band’s classic rock mainstay “The Joker,” and some wonderful never-before-heard original tunes.
For Johnson, two of the most exciting tracks are “WACS” and “When the Stars Are Out,” both recorded during the sessions for 2011’s The Tripper. The former is a standout for an appearance by Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis who applies a perfect psych-soul solo to the mix. The latter features another special guest, the late, great Richard Swift on piano. “I didn’t even know Richard was on that song until I was approving the masters,” Johnson says. “This was before his production career had really taken off. You could just bring him in for a session and he would just vibe out.”
Even if Johnson had some internal debates about ruminating heavily on his past work in this way, what putting together Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud did is reassure him that trusting his musical instincts has served him well for these past two decades and will continue to do so well into the future. “I love how the best-laid plans are never what you think they’re going to be. I love the unpredictability of it. Recording and writing songs is often like, ‘Wow, that is not where I was expecting that to go.’ My whole career has been like that. This was not where I expected to go. But I mean that in a really good way.”
For Fruit Bats US tour dates (Mar-May 2022), head to: http://www.fruitbatsmusic.com/tour
