Here's the short version: _The Ruminant Band_ is a solid album and an adventurous one--not a calculated chart-runner, not a cautious follow-up. If you hear the singles on XFM or iTunes, and you like them, then you'll get the album, and you'll like it. If it sounds overfamiliar or pretentiously retro--a worn appliance wrought from mid-70s Harvest-gold--you'll probably not like it, and you can move on.
But it's an important album. If you're a Fruit Bats fan, or like the Shins, or Califone, or Iron and Wine, or Fleet Foxes, or Veckatimest, you should probably give it another careful listen or two. The reviewers are praising the tunes and the echo-y lofi production by Graeme Gibson. People who are not fans of Eric Johnson's vocal qualities will find that sound mitigated by a more collaborationist band ethos. So this one stands to be a minor-major hit: a bit better received and more popular than the previous _Spelled in Bones_. But I strongly suspect that, however limited the impact may be on the immediate musical scene, this album will be recognized as a cult classic in another ten years. I think that, by then, Eric Johnson and Co. will be a biggish deal (if he's still recording), and whatever he's doing, his reputation as a gifted pop-music writer will be equaled by an established reputation as one of the best and most sophisticated of the last decade's song writers.
There's a generalized, nebulous consensus that _Ruminant Band_ distills the hippie-free-love ethos of the classic pop summer album. I get that, and my initial listens to it were skeptical exercises in grudging toleration for a song writer that I'd previously admired. I figured that Johnson couldn't have gotten so uninspired and cynical that he was throwing out old bones to the live-jam bongwater tailgators. But I kept hearing something disturbingly anodyne like him chirping out varied refrains of "We are not alone!" And there's every reason to treat that as a respectable sentiment if you recognize that we're all one spiritual people, united in a communion of peace and harmony with all living things on Spaceship Earth. I'm down with that, if that's the message that grabs you. But that bromide doesn't do much to explain loneliness or all the other unpleasant bits that seem to naturally evolve out of the sense of alienation, betrayal, the impermanence of what is good, and the certitude of death.
That's from the silly-funny parable song, "Being on Our Own." Its little allegory works in a fashion similar to They Might be Giants' "Particle Man," if you recall that. In that light, "Being on Our Own" is sardonic but pretty depressing. It playfully treats the theological problem of theodicy--how evil and sorrow can be possible in a world created by a good, benevolent god--as the consequence of the fact that God perversely thwarts all our hopes and, at last, kills us. And--Johnson sweetly reassures us--there's not much sense in hoping for something better in an afterlife, 'cause chances are you're gonna be "soil" before you're that immortal "soul" you're hankering after. You've got a better chance of coming back a "goat" than a "ghost." Even his final reference to salvation, enlightenment, nirvana--the "light at the end of the line where everything's defined"--gets left an unfulfilled, unproven promise that becomes more unlikely the more we are aware of the unending ire of the "man who lives in the sun [who's] got it out for everyone." So, says Johnson's cheery moral, you live and die alone. We all live and die alone. *But* we have the satisfaction of knowing with wisdom that it's a universal predicament: "we're not alone" in experiencing the loneliness of life and death.
Having spelled it out (the same moral as the earlier "Spelled in Bones" single), he offers for counsel a little Zen asceticism, a little Crowley-esque thelemic paeon to the erotic will that partly constitutes us [perfectly normal for a pop hipster--Bowie and Plant were all about it in the mid-70s], and a lot of acquiescence to the fact that life is good to a great extent because it doesn't last--just like love.
In the concluding number, "Flamingo," Johnson suggests that the nice and necessary thought immediately before death should be "everything is gonna be just fine," but that's likely "a little bit [of a] dream." A more reliable report of post-mortem Johnson will be what you get when the fertile rains of May leave "the old pink flamingo face down in the mud."
I won't talk about them all. Suffice it to say, Johnson has got a coherent message, and he's actually saying something--*a lot* in fact. And he's suggesting that you don't have to be Tom Waits groaning with the distress of the Weil/Brechtian moritat to say it. Indeed, he's turning the bitter pill into some kind of freshly baked loaf of wholewheat bread, warm and sweet. If you weren't careful, you might snuggle-up with your Old Lady after a few tokes and bliss-out on it.
The album's crux is the brutal disappointment of passionate unrequited love in "Singing Joy to the World." Just reading that title, I knew I would detest the song, and instead I see that it's the romantic epitome of the whole album. Just because you never got real love in return--just because you never had a chance, that doesn't mean that surrendering to hope isn't the right thing to do. Rather, it's the only worthwhile thing to do when life is so short.
