FLEET FOXES

Music review: The rousing retro-folk of Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues

By The Burg Staff on May. 18, 2011
By Matt Ashare

For all the grousing and grimacing over the deleterious impact digital technology has had on the music industry (i.e., on major music labels), the same cannot be said for the effect it’s had on music itself. Beginning with the introduction of CDs in the late ’80s, the move to digital precipitated a veritable deluge of hard-to-find, out-of-print, and just plain obscure releases by a bevy of odd artists whose work is now not much harder to find online than the latest Lady Gaga remix.
     In fact, over the past dozen years, the rediscovery of lost recordings by late-’60s/early-’70s singer-songwriters like Vashti Bunyan, Judee Sill, and Jeff Buckley’s father Tim Buckley, has helped catalyze the emergence of the so-called “freak-folk” movement, a loosely bound underground that includes Baltimore’s Animal Collective and all its various spin-offs, Detroit singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens, and the California songstress Joanna Newsom. (Incidentally, I prefer the designation “avant-folk,” given the often experimental nature of “freak-folk,” but apparently I’ve been out-voted.)
     Until now, this indie offshoot hasn’t produced a true Billboard-charting breakthrough on par with the Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs or even the Decemberists’ more recent The King Is Dead. But with Fleet Foxes gearing up for an American and European tour to support their new Helplessness Blues, that may soon change, in part because the Seattle-via-Portland sixsome have crafted an album that, even at its most extreme, is only guardedly avant.
It was a rich knowledge of folk-rock history, reflected in the fingerpicked guitars, flawless vocal harmonizing, and hints of Harvest-era Neil Young on Fleet Foxes, the band’s hushed 2008 full-length debut, that gained the group acceptance among freak folkies and led to singer-guitarist Robin Pecknold touring with Joanna Newsom in 2009.
     That jaunt kickstarted Pecknold’s songwriting for Helplessness Blues, and may explain why, despite the addition of a crafty sixth member — multi-instrumentalist Morgan Henderson — much of the album retains the pastoral, stripped-down sensibility of Fleet Foxes, particularly the muted “Blue Spotted Tail,” with its single acoustic guitar and close-mic’ed vocal track, and the more strongly sung and strummed, drum-less album closer “Someone You’d Admire.” But Henderson’s impact on a group that includes guitarist Skyler Skjelset, drummer Josh Tillman, bassist Christian Wargo, and keyboardist Casey Wescott, offers Pecknold the opportunity to broaden Fleet Foxes’ folk-rock palette, and he takes full advantage.
     Acoustic guitars still dominate, and those sterling, sometimes choir-like harmonies that at various times bring to mind Crosby, Stills and Nash (the pounding opener “Battery Kinzie”) and early Simon & Garfunkel (the airy epic “The Plains/Bitter Dancer”) remain central to Fleet Foxes’ appeal. Yet a vaguely Eastern-sounding violin accents the swooning “Bedouin Dress,” hammered dulcimer makes an appearance in the fast-picked “The Cascades,” and pedal steel slides accentuate the comfortable countrified clutter of “Grown Ocean.”
     Pecknold can occasionally be too preciously poetic for my tastes — “I slept through July while you made lines in the heather” (“Lorelai”) is a bit much. But his growing command of folk idioms serves him well, especially on the disc’s centerpiece, the yearning, rousing title track “Helplessness Blues,” a sprawling strum-along number with lyrics that recall early Dylan. “And now after some thinking,” he sings, “I’d rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.” Don’t look now, Robin, but you already are.http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_the_rousing_retro-folk_of_fleet_foxes_helplessness_blues
Ashare, a freelance writer living in Lynchburg, is a former music editor for the Boston Phoenix.