It’s rare to find album art which so accurately depicts the music it encases, but surfacing Seattle group Fleet Foxes have managed to provide the perfect face for their debut self titled album. The cover offers a vibrant renaissance painting depicting a colourful array of characters in a busy street scene, fronting an almost hidden natural hillside. The chosen artwork is apt as it bears striking resemblance to the ‘Baroque Pop’ sound which vocalist Robin Pecknold has weightlessly produced together with Skyler Skjelset, Bryn Lumsden, Nicholas Peterson and Casey Wescott. The album is an uplifting, if not enchanting collection of music boasting some seriously dense imagery and stunning harmonies that would do Simon & Garfunkel proud.
Fleet Foxes opens with an A Capella intro, almost a kind of provincial spiritual, kicking off with the genuinely pure vocals that follow the album through its entirety. White Winter Hymnal is beautifully arranged complete with Garfunkel-esque tympani and tambourine, casting a captivating snow scene of children playing. Tiger Mountain Peasant Houses follows close by, with the kind of butter-melting fingerwork from Pecknold and Skjelset on guitars that you might find from Neil Young circa Crosby, Stills & Nash. The optimism of this album is incredibly warming, permeating even the concluding death ballad Oliver James with the band’s joyful musicality. This stuff is so sunny.
As serene as much of their music is, however, Fleet Foxes allow for a great deal of movement in the album and clearly exercise restraint in maintaining a rough three-minute song length, despite clear scope for eight-minute musical showiness. Covering narrations of families, lost lovers, natural wonders and death beds, Fleet Foxes has been tightly produced and is at no point sloppy or lacking in direction. Although it holds the potential to have easily become a bit of a Joan Baez wandering-minstrel cover album, it holds its own style and pulls the folk era successfully into 2008 – a kind of Shins-meets-Sigur Ros answer to their 1960s predecessors. I bet Joni would love this album.
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