The Fleet Foxes

 I guess I was always gonna fall this band. As a devout disciple of Melancholia in most of it’s forms, the uplifting sadness rung from the lusty throats of these young, bearded Americans with their premonitions of death, their graves, Red Squirrels and Blue Ridge Mountains has captured my heart so completely. Mary and I have a copy in the van and as soon as we set off it’s on. A couple of months ago we stayed in Norfolk for a week and hung about in ancient graveyards, walked through the poppies and crabbed off the pier and it was the Fleet Foxes album that was our soundtrack, so aptly suited to the ghosts, half seen in the twilight; and the Windmill, cheerfully sturdy beneath sixteenth century skies. 

We drove down to brighton to watch them play, drank beer on the seafront (well, I did) and walked through the lanes. Afterwards I bumped into three of them and tried drunkenly to trick them into coming out drinking with me but I was a wee bit slurry and was soon having my head bounced off the kerb by their driver. They are a powerful band live, full throated and sweaty and my only disappointment was the absence of ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’, a song that I will take to my grave.

The album landscape puts me in mind of Dylan’s ‘John Wesley Harding’ where open fields, towns and strange meetings dominate and yet seem intangible, ever shifting, glimpsed through the miasmic cobwebbery of the vague. Lyrically, I find only secrets and puzzles, songs about dead boys and Meadowlarks drift past, like a scene taken from Alexander Sokurov’s trippy film, Russian Ark and at the end I’m none the wiser about who’s dead, who isn’t or who is related to whom. The melodies never stay around for long, there’s always something else about to happen and as a musician I love the way they work their chords. The whole thing makes me want to try just a little harder.

I put my order in for the vinyl the week it came out on eil.com and Amazon but nothing’s come through yet. I hope they haven’t deleted it already. 

Because thataways Melancholia doth lie. 

Oh yes.