New Lovers and Old Flames, Part One is Fleet Foxes
posted February 3, 2009, 5:05 pm | Log In To Post Comments | 
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Tags: fleet foxes, sun giant, fleet foxes ep
By now the word as gotten out about Fleet Foxes, but my own affaire de coure with them came this summer. I don't do this every time I hear a new song or band, but I enjoy listening to new music while traveling. That way I expose myself to new music in new places: music in context. It really all started in middle school, in Italy, with a brand new Ashanti CD. Now, whenever I hear her voice on the radio, I have flashbacks of the streets of Florence as we walked to the Medici Chapel. The Shins remind me of the sky in New Mexico, and Camera Obscura thrusts me back into the lavender dusted, bee infested house my family rented in Southern France. Shuffling songs on my iPod is like going on a world tour. Fleet Foxes entered the equation when I was thirsty for new music and my family decided to take a vacation in the desolation that is the American Southwest.
The trip was long but mostly disorienting. The Four Corners are strange that way - you are in four states at once, and you keep forgetting which ones they are. The desert lays out like a dusty carpet and the skies melt into each other. The desert transcends state borders and Indian reservations. Looking out at it all was a task within itself, but it was also the context of my discovery of Fleet Foxes and their new album, Sun Giant. Which seemed all the more appropriate for where I was. Wherever that was.
This plaid-sporting, forest-dwelling band can seem, on the surface, like any other indie band out there. Being an indie band from Seattle is, at this point, almost cliche. But their harmonies, and especially Robin Pecknold's voice, were the things that separated them from the rest. They emerged from the woods of Washington with this incredible sound, this incredibly honest voice. Upon hearing Pecknold yell to the high heavens in the track Oliver James, I instantly thought of Crosby, Stills and Nash, but also Neil Young. Pecknold's almost feminine-like falsetto alone brings up striking similarities between him and Young, but the harmonies in tracks like Heard Them Stirring and He Doesn't Know Why bring out the inner Beach Boy in him. Fleet Foxes have managed to create a sound reminiscent of both the early and late sixties, adding to that a rustic quality found in the folk music that prevailed throughout the decade. Fleet Foxes succeed because they make you become nostalgic for a time you may or may not have lived in, that may or may not have even existed.
Amongst gigantic throne looking mesas and a sea floor of sand, I felt like I was two thousand leagues under a brilliant Southwestern sky. There was endless emptiness, interrupted only by some great rock or broken down trailer or cluster of plants, clinging to life. Strangely, it was here in this wild remote edge of the country that I came to know Fleet Foxes so well. Pecknord's voice - which can soothe like steam but prove more powerful than the rapids of the Colorado River - filled the emptiness with his powerful vocals. Their lyrics, about strawberries in the summertime and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee, captured the spirit of folk music and attitude of the American South.
I heard them again a few weeks later, in Chicago, when they performed at Pitchfork. Hipsters lined the stage walls and were not letting me get any closer, so I stood at the edge of the grounds. I was dripping wet from the rain but wiping sweat off my face from the heat (Humidity will always be an article of confusion for Californians like me). The air was moist with the smell of thousands of people and warm rain, but hearing my favorite track, White Winter Hymnal, and its echoing verses (I was following the pack all swallowed in their coats/the scarves of red tied round their throats) took me back to the desert, the sand, the unrelenting sun and vast emptiness. What should remind me of winter in DC instead gave me flashbacks of the desert in the summertime. Their earthy tones, lyrical maturity and divine melodiousness proved to cut across both time and space.
They are, in my opinion, not just deserving of all their newfound praise, but the premier music group to watch out for in 2009. I hope to revisit them again sometime, whether I am in some foreign corner of the world or sitting in my room. Heaven knows where or when they will take me next.
