Fleet Foxes

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Editorial reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
It's now twenty years since grunge emerged from then culturally isolated Seattle and Fleet Foxes, the eponymous debut album from the city's latest heroes, demonstrates just how much American independent rock has mutated in that time. The five young members of Fleet Foxes make up a very different sort of rock band, describing their own music as "baroque harmonic pop jams". Even that understates the depths of the quintet's effortless vocal harmonies and gently woozy, folky feel. Of their contemporaries only the enigmatic Midlake and My Morning Jacket at their most fragile come close, but neither could have cooked up the Beach Boys spiritual of "White Winter Hymnal" or its more powerful companion piece "Ragged Wood". In fact Fleet Foxes happily admit to aspiring to an earlier tradition--not just obvious antecedents like the Byrds, the Association, Neil Young and, especially, David Crosby's famously unfocussed solo album If Only I Could Remember My Name but ancient English folk songs and their later American descendents. All were hunted and gathered from the internet--songwriters Robin Pecknold and Skye Skjelset are barely in their twenties. Add a host of unlikely instruments and the results are stunning, the complete antithesis of mainstream stadium indie that has followed Arcade Fire. Still, the cover features a Bruegel painting of peasants that might have graced any Black Sabbath sleeve. In that way at least Fleet Foxes salute a local tradition. -—Steve Jelbert

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2008-11-30 rating:
Beautiful
Wonderful and haunting. It sounds both contemporary, seventies and has more than a hint of old 19th century American folk music about it.

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review by: adam k date: 2008-11-29 rating:
Not quite Fleet enough
Perfectly nice, perfectly pretty and certainly musically accomplished, the Fleet Foxes sound like...well, it's already been said, but certainly my first impression was the Beach Boys singing the back catalogue of Crosby Stills & Nash, with an annoying overlay of reverb. Unfortunately, they also lack any originality, soul or passion, and after a while (and I've listened to this album many, many times) the bucolic whittering and twee lyrics become somewhat dull, and sometimes even cringeworthy. For this to be hailed as "unique" or "a breath of fresh air" when it is patently neither is astonishing, while one newspaper has referred to it a "landmark", which implies the musical version of a "slow news day". It's sweet, derivative and actually quite forgettable.

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review by: Mo Backstep date: 2008-11-29 rating:
blandy blandy laaaaaa....
How you can you praise something as being 'new' when ultimately it is so derivative and based purely on music of the past? Good on them for trying but it doesn't work for me.

Having read the reviews here as a big fan of 60's west coast and psych, I was hoping that I'd hear something that updated and reinvented the genre. I was really disappointed to say that least. Fleet Foxes have made an album without hooks, any catchiness or 'listen again' factor as far as I'm concerned. It's sweet and cute and trying to be authentic in what it tries to do (even down to the artwork) - but it's dull.

And I also agree that the production is poor. If they could get such a pure, rich sound in the 60's when multitrack recording and stereo sound were both in their infancy, how is it possible to get it so wrong here?

The vocals are right at the forefront, and that just displays their weakness. In the three/four part harmonies that you hear I kept getting distracted that one voice is just that bit 'out', and if your trying to do this sort of music, using CSNY and the Byrds as obvious influences and with so much stuff out there, you've got to get it bang on or it doesn't work.

To add to that the strong songs just aren't here. They flew out of my head as soon as the album finished. I'd recommend that you if you hear this and feel the same, go check out the originals - The Left Banke, The Pretty Things, early Floyd, Beach Boys, The Zombies, CSNY, Buffalo Springfield etc and hear how they effortlessly write an amazing song/melody. They've stuck around for 40 years so that can't be a bad thing....

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review by: date: 2008-11-17 rating:
RATHER GOOD
HELLO? HI, THIS IS A GOOD ALBUM, THE SONGS ARE GOOD, IT MAKES YOU FEEL GOOD, IT MAKES YOU THINK.


review by: date: 2008-11-03 rating:
Honest opinion
After catching a track on last.fm and locating and putting the album in my amazon wishlist I got around to ordering it for myself, as no one else seems to do it for me :-(
I have given this a good listen a few times and I can honestly say that I think the album is great and the tunes are still going around in my head.

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