Fleet Foxes - A folk religion for the millennial generation

Perhaps the 2000s bore witness to too many revolutions happening alongside the world of music (the collapse of the record industry, above all) to give birth to truly iconic stylistic movements, the kind that American classic rock in the Seventies or synthetic pop in the Eighties could claim to be. It took quite a while just to shed the stylistic tropes of the previous decade - tropes that perhaps never really died - before they could rise again in full, as the rule dictates, right now, twenty years later.

The Pacific Northwest was once again the catalyst for a movement that became one of the defining imprints on contemporary music, eventually spilling over, as happened with grunge, into the wider musical imagination. Around Seattle, by 2008, there were already several groups ferrying the Nineties toward something else (Carissa's Wierd, later Band Of Horses, Norfolk & Western, Loch Lomond, and even DCFC were steering emo toward indie pop-rock), but across the whole of the United States it was hard to find a band making acoustic, country or folk music with the same aesthetic 'break' as Fleet Foxes (worth mentioning at least is Joanna Newsom, long considered a kindred spirit, who in 2006 released her most acclaimed work, 'Ys').

Anyone who remembers the first time they heard Sun Giant, the EP that introduced Fleet Foxes to the world, also remembers a touch of astonishment - after years of new new wave, of Arcade Fire and National - at hearing an a cappella track built on multiple vocal harmonies. Released before the self-titled Fleet Foxes but actually recorded afterwards, the EP still stands today as the perfect summa of Robin Pecknold's band's world, not merely as a checklist of their traits, but as a genuine artistic achievement. But let's take a step back: despite the 'scene' and the contribution of Phil Ek and Sub Pop to the birth of the Fleet Foxes sound, the band is above all a child of isolation. Robin Pecknold was one of those introverted, chubby kids with few friends at school; his family had just moved, his older brother and sister were away at college. His only friend was Skye Skjelset, another shy kid, also from a Norwegian family. Together they learned to play guitar, eventually forming a duo: Pineapple. Luckily for them, a Californian punk band would soon order them to drop the name before lawyers got involved. Out of that came Fleet Foxes, two boys with barely any social life who, through sheer practice, would end up releasing their first 'grown-up' material while still very young.

Sun Giant is one of the earliest works of the Laurel Canyon-ish revival (which would later also find expression in Jonathan Wilson and First Aid Kit, among others), whose post-hippy aesthetic ties together Pecknold's musical loves: on one hand the "harmonized" pop of Beach Boys, Zombies and Association, on the other the English folk of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and Pentangle. An ever more clear-cut revival, made possible in part by a musical catalogue that, thanks to Napster, had by then become fully accessible. It is also, in spirit, worlds apart from its contemporaries and immediate predecessors: nowhere on the record is there a trace of the stylistic tics and loser aesthetic of the Nineties — quite the opposite, there's an almost pre-modern artistic "platform", the kind romantically evoked back in the days of the British folk revival. It's a Bruegel-esque landscape impetus that drives the songs on Sun Giant, as in the superb, Babel-like, Eastern-tinged constructions of "English House", or in the gluttonous, liberating triumph of "Drops In The River", a true showcase of the Fleet Foxes sound.

Something of cult and devotion is baked into that sound, as even the arrangements confess: kaleidoscopic as they are, they build an "organic" symphony, not just through the choice of instruments but through how they're kept separate, with the deliberate intent of making them resonate as independent objects, in a process that's entirely reproducible. Amid all this, as Newsom herself notes, it's Pecknold's songwriting that stands out. Some have even called it mannered (and the charge hasn't always proven unfounded), which is partly why it appeals to the new generation of alternative snobs — but perhaps above all because of a loose, catch-all kinship with artists who genuinely did and do make idiosyncrasy their stylistic signature (Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, and Newsom herself).

But the "thematic" stamp of Pecknold's songs is so strong that some of his tracks have refrains widely described as Morricone-esque, such is their monolithic impact. Of course, this central theme is then recast and declined in various forms, and it's no secret that many Fleet Foxes songs escape the classic verse-bridge-chorus structure, often saving their best moment for a final variation. A prime example — not only "the" song of this EP, but arguably "the" Fleet Foxes song — is "Mykonos", which is also their most CSN&Y-inspired track, with its driving, stop-and-go minor-key surges. All of Pecknold's reference points, however prominently displayed, come across softened, as throughout the whole millennial revival — not only because of his different personality, but also because of the greater confusion of the times and the resulting difficulty of delivering clear-cut messages, like the Bob Dylan that Robin still calls his North Star. A barely-sketched existentialism (the opening line of Helplessness Blues is famous by now: “So now I am older/ Than my mother and father/ When they had their daughter/ Now, what does that say about me?”), a yearning for simpler things — particularly for the simpler, idealized life of the grandfather who tended an orchard — are the signals that resonate with the Fleet Foxes audience, together with a faceless spiritualism, more agnostic than pantheistic, translated musically through the persuasive, vaguely unresolved character of Pecknold's songs. He also presents himself in a fairly novel way compared to the bands of the time: he's a "vocal" frontman first and foremost (a somewhat unfashionable tool at that moment), as shown by his guitar-and-voice piece, somewhat Harper, somewhat Buckley, "Innocent Son". The vocal lines are the true lifeblood of Fleet Foxes, and the instruments, though always present, are openly supporting players (perhaps this is also partly why someone like Tillman, the drummer who later became Father John Misty, would eventually chafe enough to leave the band).

All the most impactful, most recognizable songs are found on the self-titled debut, Fleet Foxes, a genuine album from another era — the kind with five or six singles ready for radio, to put it plainly. And it will indeed get radio play: "White Winter Hymnal", with its "Christmassy" spirit so easy to misread (it actually tells a little scene that could have inspired a Flemish winter landscape), reached national mainstream radio rotation even in Italy. In a music world where "rock" music, in the broadest sense, is drifting further and further from the mainstream, Fleet Foxes remains one of the golden exceptions, and would prove important enough to launch an entire (unfortunately diminished) movement inspired by a return to "folk" instruments — the "rural" boy bands Mumford And Sons and Lumineers, an oratorical counterpoint, with the crassness of their optimism, to Pecknold and co.'s naturalistic invocations. But plenty of later "vocal" country-rock (for instance Alabama Shakes) will also find a new anthem in "He Doesn't Know Why".

The songs on this self-titled debut could be reinterpretations of old Appalachian classics, with their baroque expressiveness and youthful exuberance ("Ragged Wood"), their images of ancestral mysticism and symbolic toponymy (the timeless ballad "Tiger Mountain Song", as if written by an Elliott Smith who'd discovered his inner Walden-esque hermit). Above all, it's the songs' strong melodic identity that makes Fleet Foxes so dense, powerful, and reverberating with meaning: every colour found in Bruegel's paintings seems reproduced here. It's impossible to hear the opening chords of "Blue Ridge Mountains" (with its gorgeous chord progression, tinged with elegiac soul) without picturing the bluish outline of hills wrapped in mist, fireflies bursting into life alongside the mandolin solo. Or not to see Clint Eastwood's silhouette looming over the notes of "Your Protector", with its cinematic arrangement somewhere between Tex-Mex and post-punk.

Although Fleet Foxes contains arrangement ideas that would help found and patent the band's signature sound (the vocal harmonies, the electric lead guitar with its generally arabesque tones, a rather square, classic-rock rhythm section), it's a fairly linear record and, however excellent the songwriting, not one of great depth — bordering, in a few moments, on the cloying, in its proposal of a sound so full and almost reactionary against everything that happened between 1978 and the three decades that followed ("Quiet Houses" exemplifies the pride of bringing back to light an almost anthropologically different mode of expression, with its stolid gait). This may be why the ambient interludes ("Heard Them Stirring", "Sun It Rises") or the voice-and-acoustic pieces work so well by contrast (for instance the closer "Oliver James", the most traditionalist track — it sounds like a Woody Guthrie cover — yet it's also the most "progressive", both stylistically and in its more "engaged" narrative theme).

All the songs on Fleet Foxes sound a little two-dimensional, perhaps, to the point that, years later, one can still recall them down to the smallest detail — and that's partly why, with due proportion, this is an album whose impact can be compared to the great guitar-rock records of the Nineties, the kind that pushed so many kids to pick up a guitar and learn to play it. No matter if, alongside them, at least part of the mass hipster movement was also born — at least in its hippie/grunge, Pacific Northwest incarnation. For a moment, for instance when the album became the first "gold" record for Bella Union in the UK, there was hope that the ever-widening gap between independent and popular music might finally be healed. But then Mumford And Sons and the Lumineers would prove just how easily an original, even profound aesthetic can today be dismantled and replaced by hollow, somewhat disingenuous slogans.

Pecknold sensed this phenomenon, and perhaps partly because of it, his music from that point on would grow ever more intricate and layered, without losing its identity. It's this process of searching that leads to Helplessness Blues, the record that still stands today as their most balanced and aesthetically complete. It's their "Holiday", if it had come right after "Homecoming" — drawing the parallel with America.

With melodies far less obvious than on the debut — almost "square", in fact — the songs on this record resemble the symphonies of a liturgy: not necessarily melodically exuberant, but thematically defined enough to stick in the memory, to take on meaning through their purely musical content alone. From the start, Pecknold had admired and absorbed the devotional drive of Brian Wilson's songwriting, for example, and Helplessness Blues represents the true vocal "breviary" of the Fleet Foxes sect.

Apples instead of bread ("The Shrine/An Argument", with the song's shift marked by an organ), in the virtual reconstruction of a mythical past, where the certainty of manual labour still lives on (the old uncle's orchard) and, perhaps, of a place in this world and the next. This is the core of the doctrine — sprung from a post-adolescent sense of disorientation — of Helplessness Blues, projected by the title track with a dazzling grandeur, in a gentle, Malick-like existentialism, with its memorable closing hymn:

If I had an orchard

I'd work till I'm raw

If I had an orchard

I'd work till I'm sore

And you would wait tables and soon run the store

A handful of lines that surely resonate with the lives of so many Western twenty- and thirty-somethings, who know neither manual labour nor nature itself except through intermediaries — caught in that limbo of a budding career, where one has to figure out what to do with one's own independence. Helplessness Blues, as before, offers up this whole pantheon of romantic, mythologized images ("Like a moonlit exile/ on the shore", as it proclaims in "Someone You'd Admire") to speak, in depth, to the mix of emotions — terror and triumph alike — running through Pecknold's peers, and it does so in the rawest way the band has ever attempted. Above all, without the obsession with melody that burdens Fleet Foxes.

They sound freer and more unselfconscious this way — the roaring surges of "Grown Ocean", "Lorelei" and "Battery Kinzie" (also alike in the record's "liturgical" intent), steeped in a humanizing religiosity, a gospel grounded in lived experience.

Inspired by the twelve-string guitar Roy Harper used on “Stormcock”, Helplessness Blues favours a more elusive style of songwriting, calibrated less on mood swings and more on its own expressive and emotional content (the outburst of “Sim Sala Bim” also falls under this sphere of influence). This is the spirit in which the album's solo tracks are born: the opening “Montezuma”, which already sets itself “in tune” with the listener's existential dilemmas, teasing them with its nervy, reverb-soaked fingerpicking; the sort of collective confession of doubt that is “Blue-Spotted Tail” (“Why is the Earth moving ‘round the Sun?/ Floating in the vacuum with no purpose/ not a one”); and the already-mentioned wedding march of “Someone You’d Admire” (perhaps the finest voice-and-guitar piece Pecknold has ever written).

Helplessness Blues is an album written in a major key, but built on the perspective of a young man weighed down by doubts and by the circumstances of life, by his own inadequacy – like everyone else, but, unlike most, able to turn that whole burden into a framework within which to transcend, and finally to accept and even rejoice in those weaknesses – in short, perhaps the essential ingredients of any self-respecting religion. Despite flatter melodic lines overall, this is an album in which the work on the arrangements really comes to the fore: true voices in their own right, rather than the mostly functional devices used in Fleet Foxes simply to reinforce or support a melodic line (worth noting, the band meanwhile gained two new members, notably multi-instrumentalist Christian Wargo). Hence the violin arrangement on “Bedouin Dress”, the flute on “The Plains/Bitter Dancer”, and a rhythm section that is far more considered and, at last, actually drives the record. In short, this is an album full of hidden corners, a maze of caves and coves, at the bottom of which sits a bearded man, alone, playing his guitar.

What happens next is a (non-)story everyone already knows. What happened, now five years ago, in the wake of the tour supporting “Helplessness Blues”, is a (non-)story everyone already knows. Fleet Foxes seemed to fall apart: Josh Tillman left the band (not without a touch of bitterness) along with his mopey solo project, to step into the spotlight under the far more sarcastic, flamboyantly crowd-pleasing and pretentious alias Father John Misty, while Christian Wargo also launched a new side project, Poor Moon (with FF keyboardist Casey Wescott). Meanwhile, not unexpectedly (for better or worse), it was above all Tillman who achieved the fame he craved, selling a bit of his soul to the devil along the way, while Pecknold allowed himself at most the occasional sparse social media appearance – in one of which he announced he had gone back to studying at Columbia, in New York. In an open-question thread on Reddit, Pecknold revealed that the band's hiatus had also allowed him to wait out the period in which folk music, or at least its stylistic tics, had become the daily bread of mainstream music, and that by that point (2016) he felt ready once again to put out an album under the Fleet Foxes name without feeling obliged to distort their sound, and above all in a climate that felt more culturally “acceptable”.

All these circumstances, entirely human but also revealing of a process that is more cerebral than a mark of artistic growth, go some way to explaining the deliberate, overthought character of the band's hugely anticipated return, titled Crack-Up. Even the first two records had already shown a clear trajectory in Pecknold's writing, becoming steadily less melodic and increasingly impressionistic, with an ever-growing focus on dynamics and layering. Interpolating between the first two albums would have been a possible but risky move, yet even this imaginary third “point” seems to align perfectly – and now the trajectory projects six years further on.

In short, Crack-Up is an album that was given a great deal of time, and it is the result of plenty of second-guessing. Within the pretended complexity of these sprawling tracks, often split into movements (this time even triple ones), what seeps through is indecision, and, as often happens with a diligent student like Pecknold (with whom it's impossible not to sympathise), the anxiety to prove something. This comes across, for instance, through a sparser, more disjointed sound, abandoning the band's typical fullness in favour of some ill-defined, withdrawn, convoluted sonic framework. Still, despite everything, it doesn't come across as a pretentious album – if anything, the love for music and for craft has never been more palpable.

What has broken, or at least grown stiff, though, is the channel of communication between Robin and his audience, given how hermetic his melodies have become and how grandiose the arrangements are, among which orchestral touches now appear. There are plenty of variations on Crack-Up, as fascinating as they are off-putting: the baritone crooning attempt à la Harry Nilsson on “I Should See Memphis”; the minimalist, “urban-folk” ballad “If You Need To, Keep Time On Me”, vaguely reminiscent of Vernon, a reference echoed again in the rarefied polyphonic close, with horn accompaniment, of the title track; there are proggy scale games, as on “Mearcstapa” and “Fool’s Errand”. Above all, there are plenty of crooked, overwrought melodic constructions, alternating utterly flat major-key passages with off-key digressions (“Kept Woman” sounds like a bad First Aid Kit song, even if it seems to think otherwise), mixed in with already well-worn solutions that sound rehashed (“Cassius”).

In short, the band's transformation from torchbearers of folk's popular revival into a fetish object for the young intelligentsia is now complete (NB: this is not a value judgement), and if that was the mark Pecknold wanted to hit, he's hit it. But if Crack-Up were the long-awaited cinematic comeback of a young director, it would be the kind of refined work everyone would rush to praise for its “complexity”, for its “boldness”, amid hearty pats on the back and a chorus of wide-eyed, baffled nods of approval. In reality, Fleet Foxes' stylistic renewal still looks rather sketchy: the arrangements and stylistic choices are, deep down, the product of an intellectual whim, and Pecknold's songwriting is the least inspired and most “over-chewed” he has ever produced.

It wouldn't be a surprise if this turned out to be Fleet Foxes' last album, a sort of accelerated reunion leading to an even more accelerated dissolution, toward that “something new” which remains his frontman's secret desire.

There's certainly nothing mysterious about the band's recourse to water imagery on their next album, released (as is now customary) as a surprise, timed down to the minute with the autumn equinox in 2020. And it's just as easy to use that imagery to frame Shore as an album of rebirth for Robin Pecknold and co., acting as a counterweight to Crack-Up, which three years earlier had marked the band's return on paper, some years after their triumphant debut.

Shore, on the other hand, is a long-awaited return to normality for the band, something that seems to come through even in the accounts of the album's gestation and in its promotional imagery, starting with the “iconographic normality” of Pecknold himself. It's an album that once again projects Fleet Foxes to the status of a truly global band, not unlike Coldplay, at times even musically (“Can I Believe You”, “I’m Not My Season”), or simply in the spirit of the record, celebratory and anthemic.

On the other hand, the perfect balance of this work lies in having managed not to lose the ability to offer their music as a spiritual journey, as well as a simple listening pleasure. It's a rare quality that comes through in every arrangement choice, choices that certainly draw on the lessons of “Crack-Up”, but that now accompany a much more focused and “open” style of songwriting.

Although the bright, obvious melodies of Sun Giant and the self-titled debut LP are no longer within Pecknold's reach (even if “Sunblind” is a fine attempt), Shore has nothing to envy in the moody, bucolic character of Helplessness Blues, in its sudden melodic openings, in its orchestral quality of a triumphant ride of the spirit beyond itself.

Having given so much to the folk-rock and pop scene of the last decade, Shore is in a sense also a moment of “taking something back”, borrowing certain arrangement ideas from Other Lives's “Tamer Animals” (“Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman”), the sun-drenched, wandering spirit of Whitney (“A Long Way Past The Past”, “Featherweight”) and the choral arrangements of San Fermin (“Wading In Waist-High Water”). But within the generosity of a fifteen-track, roughly 53-minute album lies a genuine wealth of riches: the jazz-tinged glimpses of “Quiet Air/Gioia” and of the title track; rousing sing-alongs like “Young Man’s Game”, a coming-of-age tale that is openly anachronistic given Robin's age, and “Jara”, with its great accompanying riff. But even just the small contemplative hymns of “Thymia” and “For A Week Or Two”, with their plain-spoken, vaguely evangelical imagery, are worth the price of admission.

All of this makes the album a cathartic, reconciling experience that has few equals in contemporary music, one of the rare records able to turn a certain disarming naivety, the pure and simple expression of joy, into real strengths. That is what will make Fleet Foxes' music precious well beyond the years we're living through now.

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