Tell me anything you want, any old lie will do

Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes

Nothing is forgotten, nothing gets crossed out. Fleet Foxes are all about historicity. They trade in memory and nostalgia, without any falsely romanticized view of the past. There is a common fallacy in similarly aimed art of looking to the past as a history of the present, as if the endpoint is what defines what came before, with no analysis of what was and what could have been. The paths taken and the paths not taken are equally essential. To that end, the sound of Fleet Foxes suggests an alternate history for popular music, a grand and perfect vision of folk of vast scale, time displacement of the pastoral rather than the urban as the predominant focus of popular culture, but not necessarily in an idealized way. Likening them to My Morning Jacket misses the point. While the lush, angelic reverberating sound of Fleet Foxes is indeed similar to My Morning Jacket, it stems from common heritage in the ‘cosmic American music’ of Gram Parsons and the timeless tales of beautiful heartbreak by Townes Van Zandt.

In the liner notes, there is an anecdote about photographs becoming false memories and the more definable reality associated with the music that accompanied memories, the ways in which music becomes inextricably entwined with moments of our personal history. As such, the music of Fleet Foxes is of a sort that could play out nonchalantly in the background to your life’s memorable moments or command them with its beauty and grace. Robin Pecknold has the sort of voice that seems deeply constrained in the quiet moments, most at home singing out in joy, content in soaring. At the closing section of the magnificent “Ragged Wood” his voice climbs the words and and rides them back down. The band’s playing is reminiscent of the great emotive, sculptural sound that Crazy Horse found in Neil Young’s least discordant moments. In the album’s most plaintive, pensive moment, “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” they ruminate on premonitions of death and consequences of forgotten acts, and fade out with Pecknold’s voice dancing away into the distance. On “Heard Them Stirring” they prove they don’t even need words to have beautiful vocal harmonies.

Lovely. Just lovely.

****

~ by jshopa on October 6, 2008.