Product Description Around the release of Mouthfuls, Harp magazine described the Fruit Bats as residing somewhere on a continuum between Califone and The Shins, combining "...the latter's widescreen vision with the former's melodic knack to create something at once familiar and new." This is Eric Johnson's enlightened Romantic opus - in the 18th century English literary sense of the term. With an emphasis on the bigger picture of life as it relates to nature's organic relationship to man and irrational, spontaneous moments of beauty and rebirth, 'Spelled In Bones' proffers warm, thoughtful, bittersweet pop that's as hopeful as it is curious. Sub Pop. 2005. Amazon.com Here's an awesome album for floating around back country roads in an old Volvo station wagon. This is folk-based pop music that's meditative, fun, and deliriously repetitive. If you've never heard the Fruit Bats, imagine a less ambitious version of the Shins, a well-worn copy of American Beauty replacing Seventeen Seconds on the turntable, and you're pretty close. If you're a devotee, you should know that Gillian Lisee is not on this record. In her stead we have Dan Strack, who played with principal singer-songwriter Eric Johnson in the poorly named but excellent band I, Rowboat. Spelled is a minor shift towards bigger things: the themes are more cosmic and the music sounds less like the product of bedroom strumming than before. "Earthquake of '73," "Lives of Crims" and "Born in the ‘70s" – these are big, beautiful, elegiac songs. Stick ‘em in a popular romantic comedy and watch this band become household names. –Mike McGonigal