Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues (2011)

Fleet Foxes return with a work of almost unparalleled beauty

9/10 

After the success of their self-titled debut album, Seattle’s Fleet Foxes are back with more of their baroque, old-worldly magic. Once again, the level of craft in the record is astonishing; I’m not even going to try to name all of the instruments they use, or pretend that I immediately got the references to Yeats, but it’s fair to say that the arrangement and lyricism in parts of this album touch upon mastery.

There’s a lot of feeling floating about in this music. As you can guess from the title, Helplessness Blues contains some very sombre moments, such as the lament of father in the medieval-sounding “The Plains/Bitter Dancer”, or the despair of a man at the “bile” of a city in “Blue Spotted Tail”. Lead singer Robin Pecknold rarely works himself into a frenzy, but one of the best moments is on “The Shrine/An Argument” when he passionately bemoans “Sunshine over me no matter what I do”, contrasting it beautifully with a softer line which leads onto a three-part ode to a lost love. The Fleet Foxes haven’t forgotten how to be cheery either but the warmer moments are usually linked with a yearning for home, such as “Bedouin Dress” with its charming violin and final track “Grown Ocean”, in which a weary traveller carries on dreaming.

Speaking of that character brings up an interesting point. While the term 'concept album' may not really apply to Helplessness Blues, there certainly seems to be a common thread linking a number of the songs. The clearest hints come from the third, fourth and fifth tracks. The magical “Sim Sala Bim” is about a love for someone who travels the world rather than devoting himself to his lover; which is followed by “Battery Kinzie”, a song where the traveller fears his lover has given him up for someone else’s arms. Meanwhile, “The Plains/Bitter Dancer” seems to deal with the return of this very traveller from his father’s perspective; but the young man is so tarnished that his father can only hold him “at arm’s length”. Maybe there’s a common theme of a man seeking out what is in the world, only to lose sight of what matters in his existential angst.

But maybe not all of the album fits in with this theme. Some songs are clearly more concerned with the straining and breaking up of a relationship such as the concurrent trio of “Lorelai”, “Someone You’d Admire” and the aforementioned “The Shrine/An Argument”. It’s notable that the obsessive detail invested by Robin Pecknold in this album caused him and his girlfriend to split apart. Of course, the neglect of a relationship does tie in with some of the earlier lyrics.

Three songs which I think perfectly demonstrate a common thread running through much of the album are at the beginning, middle and end of it. “Montezuma” is the opening track, involving bittersweet self-reflection from the narrator. But there’s maybe some irony here; he bemoans his self-centred nature which stops from, say, raising a family, but his reflection is itself a bit self-centred (“Oh man what I used to be/Oh man, oh man, oh me”). The title track has our friend showing more perspective, as he mentally seeks his place in the world (demanding “What’s my name, what’s my station?”), eschewing the individual dream of childhood for the possibilty that he could be happy just being “a functioning cog in some great machinery”. There are classic signs of his understanding moving beyond himself to the wider world and seeing it for what it really is; he denounces capitalists and bureaucrats, wishing simply to have his own orchard to work his days away in. Finally, we have “Grown Ocean”, a song of real beauty and optimism. The anxiety, heartbreak and self-reflection on this album have led to this, the narrator finally having a clear dream; of a future where he has settled and found peace.

I didn’t really mean for this to become a full-on lyrical analysis, and there's probably better places to go for that; but it goes to show how much I enjoyed listening to the lyrics, picking them apart and reading the people’s opinions on them. The depth of the lyricism is only matched by the sonic beauty of the Fleet Foxes’ work; lyrics with a baroque, old-fashioned tinge to them matched by an equally ornate, folk-like sound. There are touches of magic everywhere such as the sensuous intro of “The Plains/Bitter Dancer”, the progression of acoustic instrumental track “The Cascades” or the whimper from the trumpet in the tender final moments of “The Shrine/An Argument”.

It all amounts to one of the most stunning records of the year, a near-flawless masterpiece from one of the most creative and musically recognisable bands of today. It’s so good that upon hearing it, Pecknold’s girlfriend realised that all the effort was worth it and took him back.


This album was released by Bella Union on 2 May 2011, available from the Fleet Foxes' website or Amazon.