Ahead to the Past with Fleet Foxes

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<img src="http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee136/anuransol/foxes-sml.jpg" alt="" />

<p class="MsoNormal"><strong>By Luke Pimentel
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<p class="MsoNormal"><strong>July 11, 2008</strong></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">If postmodernism and the recycling of pop culture have taught us anything, it’s that no genre of music is sacred when it comes to being sampled, re-mixed, or pastiched. With artists like Girl Talk considerable notice from mash-ups of songs that are themselves culled heavily from samples of other songs, the detritus of the past has become so fine that you need a microscope to tell what’s what anymore.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">One movement that’s remained relatively untouched by this phenomenon is folk.<!--more--></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Perhaps that’s because of its rigid traditionalism and the reactionary clinging to ideals that caused young people to shout epithets at Bob Dylan when he went electric all those years ago. Not surprisingly, popular music passed folk by, and now—regardless of the influence of the great folk revival artists—it’s doubtful that you’ll hear Odetta or Guthrie mixing it up with Kanye West on the airwaves.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That might change, though, with the arrival of the unabashedly folk-y, Seattle-based rock outfit Fleet Foxes. The band released their forty-minute pastoral debut on Sub Pop Records last month, and it has quickly become one of the most acclaimed albums of the year.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">After giving the album a few spins, we understand the avalanche of praise. <em>Fleet Foxes</em> quite deliberately tailors itself to sound exactly like the very thing that snobby, aging music critics crave most: a return to the “golden era” of 1960’s pop. That’s not to diminish the band’s achievements, however; to their credit, the record’s approximation of an “older” sound feels not only genuine—but totally effortless and uncanny as well. Much as The White Stripes did with garage rock nine years ago, Fleet Foxes immersed themselves deep into a musical archetype and emerged with something bordering on a modern classic.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><img src="http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee136/anuransol/foxes1.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The band marks itself as fastidious even before the music begins; upon opening the elegantly-designed packaging, the listener is greeted with a CD sleeve containing paragraph after paragraph of liner notes. It’s a virtual novella, nattering on about childhood memories, the transportive power of music, and the perceived slips and stumbles that came along the way to completing the record. It then goes on to “thank” a roster of about forty well-known artists—influences, presumably—that include everyone from Joni Mitchell to Claude Debussy.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Usually, a band waits a couple albums before getting <em>that</em> self-involved. But while Fleet Foxes may sound <em>and</em> act like they’ve been around for forty years, they are one of the few acts of their kind to have the taste and talent to match their ambitions, which is abundantly clear once the music <em>does</em> begin.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">By any standard of measure, the songs on <em>Fleet Foxes</em> sound incredible. Most listeners will be effortlessly swept up by the album’s limitless supply of bright, melancholy, sweeping melodic vistas, punctuated by remarkably low-key organ work and an arsenal of deep-thudding percussion goodies seemingly pinched from the classroom of a high school marching band.<em> </em></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Lead singer Robin Pecknold’s voice has the same ethereal tambour of Jim James, and he is helped out by equally florid backing vocals; you can bet that every couple songs, this bunch will break out some lovely vocal harmonics that come straight out of the <em>Pet Sounds</em> playbook (check the quivering “White Winter Hymnal” for a choice sampling). The cavernous, reverb-heavy production could easily be the genetic offspring of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young or Yes’s <em>Close to the Edge</em>; whatever your referencing mind conjures, it will make you feel as though morning dew is condensing right on your earbuds. Yes, it is <em>that</em> far out in the woods, this album is.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><img src="http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee136/anuransol/foxes2.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Such refined musical instincts are what make Fleet Foxes an exciting find for music fans; they’ve created an album that convincingly feels of another era, even if you’re not always precisely sure what era that is.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of course, any revivalist outfit runs the risk of sounding <em>too </em>much like its own influences—Wolfmother comes to mind—and Fleet Foxes do not always escape this trap. It’s difficult, after all, <em>not</em> to sound self-conscious and a tad cornball when singing at length about meadowlarks and squirrels.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To be fair, though, repeated listens reveal some surprisingly somber rumination on pain, death and family, much like the seemingly benign cover painting, Bruegel’s “The Blue Cloak,” reveals elements of surprisingly frank carnality upon closer inspection. And one has to admire the band for their apparent willingness to commit wholeheartedly to the material; a certain amount of naïve charm only contributes to the album’s breezy appeal.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Only time will tell if Fleet Foxes can pull off new tricks down the road, but for the time being, we can all bask in the warm sunrise of one of the better retro acts to emerge in recent years.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><em><strong>Fleet Foxes </strong></em><strong>was released by SubPop on June 3, 2008. For more information, <a href="http://www.subpop.com/artists/fleet_foxes">go here.</a></strong></p>
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