Fruit Bats

Sugar appeals to the Fruit Bats, yet it never distracts from their substance. The songwriting outlet for frontman Eric Johnson, the now Seattle-based band has seen other members come and go since its 2001 debut, Echolocation, on hometown label Perishable, and has evolved from an early experimental banjo phase into something lyrical and decorous. Songs like “Spelled in Bones,” the title track of the group’s latest from Sub Pop, have a stately grace: Johnson’s airy voice, which evokes John Lennon at its most wistful and Robyn Hitchcock at his most grounded, is given a dreamy aura with lots of delicate picking and chamber-pop flourishes.

It’s hard to imagine anyone re-creating this onstage, short of Brian Wilson with a small orchestra. So expect the Bats’ live show to foreground the romantic yearning and surrealist flights of Johnson’s lyrics against a simpler backdrop. Anyone who can convincingly write a tune about the “legs of bees” wins our applause—especially when the arrangements are so breathtakingly artful. The nature boy will bring it all back home as well, since Johnson previously tackled guitar as a member of the Chicago-based Califone and was once an instructor at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Though some contend that life’s experiences are not a walk in the park, the Bats really are—like a lazy afternoon with a volume of Thoreau and a bottle of wine, amplified to just the right level of sweet intoxication.—Steve Dollar