With The Landfill, Eric D. Johnson brings Fruit Bats back from the intimate, stripped-down world of last year’s Baby Man and into the room with a full band. The difference is immediately apparent. Recorded largely live at Washington’s Bear Creek Studios without click tracks, comped vocals or a heavy reliance on overdubs, the album captures the natural chemistry between Johnson and longtime bandmates David Dawda, Josh Mease, Frank LoCrasto and Kosta Galanopoulos, with additional color from Renata Zeiguer’s violin and viola and Owen Thayer’s pedal steel. The result is a record that feels spontaneous without being loose, with Johnson’s distinctive high, reedy voice floating through arrangements that can be warm, psychedelic, soulful and occasionally expansive.
The songs themselves move easily between styles without losing their identity. “The Saddest Part of the Song” opens with a restrained, almost classic soul feel before blooming into something much larger, while “All Wounds” settles into chiming indie folk. “Think Aboutcha” brings a playful, buoyant pop sensibility, and “That Goddamn Sun” turns heartache into something warm and strangely beautiful. “Silverfish in the Sink” is one of the album’s most affecting moments, beginning with distant-sounding piano before the arrangement gradually fills in around Johnson’s quietly observant character study. There is a similar melancholy elegance to “Wild Pony Tower Moment,” while “Fishin’ for a Vision” finds Johnson at his most effortlessly melodic.
Johnson’s songwriting is particularly strong when he balances the personal with the slightly surreal. “Perhaps We’re a Storm” starts relatively quietly before gathering momentum into one of the album’s more forceful guitar-and-drum passages, while “Hummingbird Sage” turns observations of the natural world into something more reflective. Throughout The Landfill, Johnson’s morning-pages approach to songwriting gives the lyrics a conversational, stream-of-consciousness quality, but the songs never feel like unedited diary entries. Instead, everyday observations, memories and anxieties accumulate into something larger: a meditation on what we carry with us and what happens when the past becomes the foundation for whatever comes next.
The title track brings that idea into focus. “The Landfill” isn’t really about garbage so much as perspective. Johnson has described the Midwestern landfill hills of his youth as a metaphor for the accumulated weight of the past, and the song turns that literal pile of discarded things into a vantage point from which to look at everything that came before. Musically, it is one of the record’s biggest moments, with the full band pushing toward an unusually exuberant finish. That contrast is central to the album: The Landfill is filled with memories, disappointments and uncertainty, yet its music repeatedly reaches toward possibility rather than resignation.
After 25 years of Fruit Bats records, Johnson has arrived at an appealing middle ground between the intimacy of Baby Man and the collaborative energy of his full-band work. The Landfill sounds lived-in rather than meticulously constructed, and that looseness gives its melodies and lyrics room to breathe. Johnson’s voice remains an acquired taste, but once its unusual character clicks, it becomes one of the album’s greatest strengths. Warm, wistful and quietly adventurous, The Landfill is a record about looking backward without getting stuck there—and finding, in the accumulated wreckage, a surprisingly beautiful view of what might still be ahead. – Jason Felton