Fleet Foxes

I just finished a run of about six years in jobs related to the music business. Despite the enviable perk of having access to tons of free music available at any time, I found myself becoming increasingly disinterested in new bands. Much of what I encountered left no impression on me once the last song of an album faded out. I concluded that perhaps I'm simply at that age where music doesn't do for you what it once did. I've figured that the days of feeling swept away and living in anticipation for a band's next offering were now done. On most occasions, Band X will sound exactly like Band Y from the 70s, Band A will resemble Band B from the 80s and so on. Fleet Foxes, via their current release "Helplessness Blues", has restored my faith in the idea that a current band can have the power to transport you away from yourself while also holding up the mirror to reveal truths that you thought no one else could point out clearly.

"Montezuma", which opens "Helplessness Blues"' is a plaintive reflection on maturity and changing values with vocal harmonies that evoke Brian Wilson. The album is replete with meditations on past relationships and the search for personal identity. "Battery Kinzie", with its basic tom-tom foundation, is a hypnotic tale of a relationship quest that wasn't fulfilled as hoped. The opening lines of the title track are an admission of changing values with an honesty about being unsure of where change will lead:

I was raised up believing

I was somehow unique

Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see

And now after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be

A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me

But I don't, I don't know what that will be

I'll get back to you someday soon you will see

This uncertainty becomes more vivid in the stripped-down shuffle of "Someone You'd Admire":

I walk with others in me, yearning to get out

Claw at my skin and gnash their teeth and shout

One of them wants only to be someone you'd admire

One would as soon just throw you on the fire

After all is said and after all is done

God only knows which of them I'll become

The songs on "Helplessness Blues" are not delivered from the vantage point of someone who's young and ready to take on the world. Instead, the sentiments expressed are from someone who's further along on a life journey and has traveled far enough to look back as a person who's evolved along the way. The intimacy and honesty of these songs are easily accessible to those who are walking their own paths imperfectly without all of the answers they hoped would be easily available. "Helplessness Blues", with it's combination of echo-drenched vocals and sparse yet ambient folk leanings, makes you feel like you're sitting in a cozy old church enveloped in the scent of musky incense.