4 out of 5

Label: Sub Pop

Produced by: Dan Strack

As the Perishable crew all graduated from Chicago-bitten folk to variants on Americana, Fruit Bats’ first venture out into other indie waters produced the Shins mimicry of Mouthfuls, a generally gorgeous album, but occasionally conflicted with wanting to sound both accessible and acerbic. Lead man Eric D. Johnson continued to hone his feelings for what Fruit Bats could be on Spelled In Bones, an unassumingly moderate little disc that settled on to the mentality that would end up guiding Bats through many of their albums to come: reflection, and acceptance.

Johnson’s gift as a lyricist – when he’s not waxing a tad too romantic or poetic – is to combine looking back with looking forward. He might be confused about what’s happened or happening in these damn times – having been ‘Born in the 70s,’ let’s say, but instead of this becoming finger shaking at all modern-ites, he twists the questioning on himself, pledging to do something.  Even when he’s pining for a lost love (‘Canyon Girl’), it’s framed by a desire to grow and evolve. This is wended to the most delightfully toe-tapping melodies, given a warm but solid backbeat of drumming and guitar a’strumming by producer Dan Strack and mixer Brian Deck, or, on occasion, carried solely by Johnson’s lilting voice and his guitar. The electro fiddling is much less of an element this time, only appearing when the flourishes are actually necessitated, further establishing the clean-cut throwback folk rock this crew would produce starting from the next album on; Spelled in Bones was their last Sub Pop release, and, perhaps, thus the last album to kind of try playing it both ways – modern, retro – before going all in on the styles and sounds most appealing to EDJ.

The reliability of lyrical theme and memorable tunes is added to, song after song… until the title track. The answers ‘not being in the stars’ but rather ‘spelled in bones’ is an interesting reversal of the more forward-leaning thoughts found elsewhere, but this concept is somewhat undermined by appearing on one of the album’s least impactful tracks, topped only by the concluding Every Day That We Wake Up It’s a Beautiful Day that follows. The disc could’ve more rightly ended on ‘The Wind…’ and been quite perfect; the coda of contemplative, slow, undistinguished tracks lets the wind out at the very end of the experience.