echolocation

Fruit Bats | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (September 17, 2001)
• Original Release Date: September 17, 2001
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Perishable
• ASIN: B00005NZ4V
• In-Print Editions: Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #225,800 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Echolocation is the debut album from Fruit Bats. Imaginary pop hits about the unsettling nature of the great outdoors, murderous fireflies and vengeful pigeons. Imagine Eno and Elton John wrecking a campfire sing-along. Timeless sounds finding the calm in absurdity. Echolocation creates a world where gentle harmonies and subtle guitars frame lines like "arms ripped off by shooting stars". Mandolin and marimbas lead into a chorus where “ The light refracts through the glass in your feet". Dirty country fiddles bend into synthesizer lines and icebergs into garlic fields. Where perfect falsetto pop mixes with images of urban writer’s block and Vikings high on mushrooms all in the same song. It’s sexual, space age country music about seeing the beauty in natural disaster. It makes perfect sense. It shouldn’t but it does.

Songwriter/ Fruit Bats mastermind Eric Johnson has worked as a tour guide in a model home, adventure footwear salesman, pizza delivery driver/ assistant manager and spent the last few years as a banjo teacher at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. He also plays guitar, casio and banjo in Califone.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quiet Vacation, February 17, 2005

By 

R. Colton "metamorphose" (Salt Lake City, UT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: echolocation (Audio CD)

It's that spontaneous trip to the cabin. Sitting by the lake, wrapped in gentle mountain weather. No one else around but those few close friends. Watching deer graze nearby. Every star is exposed. Skinny-dipping in the lake. Crickets whispering to each other. Your marshmellow just fell in the fire.

Heavenly and delectable. For the escapist in all of us.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sparklng, secret universe, November 13, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: echolocation (Audio CD)

The Fruit Bats (Eric Johnson: songwriter, vocals, banjo, guitars & most other instruments) mix "psychedelic" (hate that word but..) front-porchy folk and fancy harmonies with eclectic rock-influenced instrumentations and surprisingly smart, weird lyrics that take us into another world. The 12 songs happily alternate between down-to-earth and outer space - lyrically, nothing here is melancholy, but there is a tangible sense that the world is very big and the important moments are really, really small. The vocal arrangements seem to come from vaguely recognizable sources in pop, indie rock and folk/country americana but they're deftly delivered in unique and catchy tunes that synthesize the complexities in life and music right now. It's like Johnson's inner life and musical unconscious just laid itself out on a lovely field, staring up into the sky and tapping its toes: you can't help but want to join in, but you're not sure if it's day or night. And are those voices coming from your own head, the stars, or the mosquitoes? Echolocation is accessible music that's also rewarding in its tricky and beautiful revelations. Dreamy from beginning to end!

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars soothing, April 19, 2003

By 

S. Smith - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: echolocation (Audio CD)

This album reminds of the very best of a Midwestern summer: the bugs at night, a cloudless sky, bike rides in the country. I am still amazed that people say there is "no good music" out there. The problem I have encountered is that it is hidden away in the musical underground, a place where, I suppose, almost everything good about this country hides anymore.