[rating=4.00]
Virtually as impenetrable as it is alluring on first listen, Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues ultimately becomes one of those albums that reveals something new about the music and the band that made it on each successive hearing. With little more than a sole acoustic guitar and billowing harmonies, the dramatically arranged opener “Montezuma” creates a rhapsodic mood that sets a tone for an album that, like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, captures the precarious mood of our times.
Fleet Foxes aren’t just supremely gifted vocalists, though they will remind us of that repeatedly on tracks like “Battery Kinzie.” Titular leader Robin Pecknold’s lyrics create graphic images like those that populate “Bedouin Dress, ” that sound at once like the height of introspection and excerpts from a medieval novel, a particularly appropriate comparison when hearing the chanting that opens “The Plains.”
And the sextet doesn’t just play along as they sing. On the contrary, they alternate the careful arranging of the “Bitter Dancer” with the collective abandon of a band in unison at the end of “Sim Sala Bim.” The driving acoustic guitars of the title song almost compete with the singing, but that’s perfectly appropriate in a song consumed with conflict. Moments like these and the duration of “Cascades” make it almost impossible not to become wholly immersed in this music, a testament not just to the material and the musicians, but the painstaking way it was recorded mixed and co-produced by the band and Phil Ek. (The mastering by Greg Calbi preserves the sound quality at its highest level).
“Lorelei” is one of the most conventionally structured and thus accessible tracks here, but it’s also the gateway cut to the dramatic climax of Helplessness Blues. A throwback to a different time in more ways than just its mini-lp packaging (with an inner sleeve for the disc to a foldout poster to lyrics printed in the gatefold) Fleet Foxes have made a statement with this album (about themselves and our era of ephemera) that concludes in celebration with the crescendo of "Grown Ocean.”
