Fleet Foxes: s/t

I had one of those moments with Fleet Foxes: the ideal first impression. The last time I had one of those was hearing Midlake’s “Roscoe” back in late 2006. It’s a moment where you hear a band for the first time and within the first minute of that song you say to yourself I need this. I listened to “White Winter Hymnal” on a Thursday morning and spent the rest of the day at work just buzzing around at my desk, staring at the clock like a schoolboy, waiting to leave so I could go directly to the record store and buy the album.

I don’t know that Fleet Foxes is quite up to par with Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther, which I listened to religiously for most of last year and is easily one of my favorite albums of the last five years, but it’s damn good. It’s easily secured a spot as one of my favorite albums of 2008.

To the last, each song on this album is cast in pastoral light, with luminous harmonies throughout, Robin Pecknold’s robust voice coated in reverb, and the roomy sound of the drums and guitars.

Still, it’s not a perfect album, if only for the fact that the band shares a glaring surface similarity with My Morning Jacket. Pecknold’s voice occupies an identical range and tone as Jim James; that alone is no fault—hey, you sound how you sound—but Fleet Foxes’ additional aesthetic choice of adding all that reverb, thereby making the sound all the more similar to early MMJ, deserves at least some penalty. As I said to my brilliant wife, you can have the same eyes and nose as Jennifer Aniston, but why then would you make a point to get her haircut? My wife, herself not a big fan of later-period My Morning Jacket, welcomed the sound, making the point that Fleet Foxes sounds like the album MMJ might have made after The Tennessee Fire had they followed that album’s folk influences rather than going the southern rock route.

Fleet Foxes is, after all, a more sophisticated album than a My Morning Jacket comparison might lead one to believe. The harmonies, upon which nearly every song here seems to effortlessly float, owe more to choir practice than to 70s rock; the songwriting is sparse, letting the voices fill the air instead, and the song structures are often more complex than typical pop. Take album highlight “Ragged Wood,” which is essentially two songs conjoined at the middle, or opener “Sun it Rises,” which is bookended by a self-contained a capella intro and a simple solo guitar and soft-voiced finale.

Ultimately Fleet Foxes shakes off all comparisons to other bands, contemporary or otherwise, with repeated listens. Pecknold’s lyrics evoke a lived-in, authentic topography—both geographic and psychological—against a cohesive sonic backdrop and simple, old-fashioned songcraft. Highly recommended.

• Fleet Foxes, White Winter Hymnal
• Fleet Foxes, Ragged Wood

Comments

[anon]

do you write for pitchfork or would you like to?

[Don]

If we want to use Reverb as a method of comparison, Fleet Foxes sounds far more like Jefferson Airplane than MMJ.

The grain silo treatments of 'It still Moves' was not an effect added to the album so much as the environment manifesting itself upon the album. The place in which it was recorded was as instrumental in shaping the record as were the ideas the band members brought to it. Here is where I disagree with your suggestion that FF copied MMJ. Fleet Foxes sound is more a tip of the hat to recording techniques of yore, the kind of timeless sound that Neko Case channels, albeit smaller. My inexperienced engineer's ears hear a church or two, and some interesting impulse responses from a plugin similar to Altiverb. The verb of Fleet Foxes invokes earthen solemnity, a cold December isolation that I think are less woven by the verb itself as by how it washes over the harmonic choices of the vocals and lyrics. When I try to compare the sound to MMJ, I get less a feeling of the verb as a tool to propel the sorrows of a song than as a feeling that the boys were just having some reverberate fun in a farmhouse, and used the place exclusively as the primary gimmick for the album's spatial depth.

So many seminal albums owe to the strange places it which they were captured on tape, I imagine someone should write a compilation about it.
www.studioenvironments.com has something near to what I'm talking about.