Review score: 5.5
Listening to the Seattle based Fruit Bats newest offering one finds it terribly hard to imagine that they have been releasing LP’s for close to 10 years now. Sure it’s absurd to think every band out there goes through Beatles or Radiohead like changes in their sonic identity, but still 10 years is a mighty long time to be releasing what is essentially the same thing.
Fruit Bats music is best described as a sort of country-folk-indie-pop combination, for lack of a better term. The newest member of their discography, The Ruminant Band, keeps true to the terribly outdated formula. It’s not so much that this particular combination of genres is bad, far from it. The thing is Fruit Bats have a knack of being, simply put, terribly boring.
Like all their previous albums The Ruminant Band never really goes anywhere, in fact I don’t even think it ever starts. It is at it’s best when you don’t pay any attention and just let it run in the background, you going about your business and the album about it’s. God forbid you actually wanting to really listen to it. As soon as you pay any kind of attention you’ll quickly discover just how run-of-the-mill it can be. You know that bland looking girl in your class that nobody ever seems to ever notice? The Ruminant Band is that girl.
If this was a debut I might have viewed it as a starting point for greater things to come, sadly Fruit Bats have been stuck on this starting point for the past 10 years and by now, at their 4th LP, they seem to have lost any hope whatsoever of reaching those “greater things”.
Ultimately this is music for people who don’t like music. If you’ve been looking for an album that neither wants nor gives you anything in return, then look no further, for here you have found the epitome of forgettable music.
music has the right 