Fleet Foxes’ “White Winter Hymnal” is the kind of song you want to curl up inside of and forget that all other music exists. The second track on the Seattle quintet’s self-titled debut is the album’s shortest offering, but encapsulates nearly everything that’s right about their joyous musical outpouring. “Hymnal” opens with the phrase “I was following the…” repeated in a trance-like vocal round where harmonic layers accumulate gradually like dust and pollen on a stained glass window until singer Robin Pecknold eases forward with the verse’s surreal refrain, full of images of coats, red scarves, heads falling in the snow and summertime strawberries. By the verse’s second round, which arrives enveloped in spindly guitar, pulsating timpani and harmonious vocalization, the overall effect is nothing short of rapturous.
It’s almost impossible not to notice the most immediate influences on Fleet Foxes: the soaring-sweet masculinity of four-part falsetto pioneers like the Beach Boys, the Byrds and CSNY. But there’s little in the way of overt nostalgia here — Fleet Foxes sound almost timeless compared to their predecessors. Their blend of folk textures, gospel singalongs, baroque complexity and delicious pop melody is distinctly modern. Their overall aesthetic makes me want to describe them as indie-hippie revisionists.
Unfortunately for me, they hate the hippie tag. To be fair, singer/primary songwriter Robin Pecknold almost resembles a young Stephen McBean (of Black Mountain), and has been photographed wearing a floppy felt hat (much to his current regret), but Fleet Foxes forgo all that peace, love and happiness bullshit for a sound closer to Arcade Fire on uppers: arty, but not sullen. Yet frequent references to mountains, birds, rivers, valley floors and the sun make for a fairly bucolic atmosphere.
“We’re all probably more city folk than not. But I mean, [nature’s] definitely a source of inspiration,” says keyboardist/singer Casey Wescott from somewhere in the Koresh-cursed desert outside Waco, TX where cellphone reception goes to die. “I guess in our area in the upper left coast, Seattle’s a city where natural scenery isn’t too far away.” (For anyone who hasn’t been, Seattle is actually a lot like Vancouver, but with way nicer people and better coffee, obviously.) “It’s also sort of local to our context in general,” he adds. “So yeah, I think that’s probably reflected in the music.”
There’s little dispute, however, over Fleet Foxes’ indie cred. Not only is the band signed to their iconic hometown label Sub Pop, guitarist Christian Wargo and Wescott both count themselves as current members of indie popsters Crystal Skulls. But the endorsement garnered unofficial status during this year’s SXSW, where the name on everyone’s lips after three days in Austin was the alliterative double “F.”
How has the resounding praise registered with the band? Hardly at all. “I don’t know how one does react to that sort of stuff,” says a modest Wescott. “Fortunately we’re just so busy playing every day and focusing on music that, thankfully, it’s been very easy to sort of keep your head in the sand.”
The sand seems to be a great place to put your head if you want to make music. This year alone, Fleet Foxes released the Sun Giant EP followed by last month’s self-titled full-length. But their creative output extends well beyond what’s been released. For their two discs, they recorded off and on with producer Phil Ek while re-recording things at home and at friends’ houses, and continue even now to reimagine the songs live. It’s a process of constant revision that Wescott attributes to simple musical evolution. “The rate of change of this band is so fast musically that we would find ourselves dissatisfied with what we’d worked on in the previous session.
“What ended up on the record is a mix of older stuff,” he adds, “but some songs on the album were literally done right before mixing. And so it sort of was: here’s a snapshot of the last couple years of work.”
Carefully balancing the sumptuous orchestral textures found on “He Doesn’t Know Why” with Pecknold’s plaintive “solo jams” “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” and album closer “Oliver James,” the record is a compact 40-minute journey revealing an impressive amount of musical scenery. Which is, in a roundabout way, how a detail-packed Bruegel the Elder painting (Netherlandish Proverbs) ended up as the album’s cover.
“There’s no real relationship to it where we’re putting the painting to music or anything like that. But Robin showed us the painting while we were working on the full length and it just sort of resonated intuitively,” Wescott offers.
And then in indie-hippie revisionist fashion adds, “If I was to look into it and analyze it, the one thing that I appreciated was all these autonomous narratives that sort of interact with each other in this larger narrative of humanity or culture. But in the same way musically, there are these parts in between songs that interact to make a whole album. But that’s a bit of a stretch. It just feels like the record, and it felt like the record when I saw it.”