'Helplessness Blues' by Fleet Foxes

An easy and recent purchase. After loving their eponymous debut, this was a release-week buy earlier this year, and I don’t make any were as many of those as I used to. No regrets either – it’s a more than worthy follow up to their first record; similar enough to be readily identifiable, but different enough to be worth having. On balance, it’s more delicately constructed than the first. The acoustic guitar dominates to a larger degree than it did beforehand, and the vocal arrangements are allowed to shine through more clearly – whether as layered harmony or stark solo. The album also feels more like it’s been stitched together like a tapestry of segments – the songs (and pieces of songs) flow from one to the other with gaps you barely notice. As a result, it’s difficult to pick out highlight tracks, but that doesn’t seem to matter.

‘Fleet Foxes’ by Fleet Foxes

‘Fleet Foxes’ are on of those bands I’d love to claim I heard early. Sadly, this wasn’t the case, and if anything, by the time I’d bought myself a copy of their debut album, it was already a bona-fide hit. Deservedly so, as it’s wonderful on more or less every level.

From beginning to end, ‘Fleet Foxes’ oozes confidence and quality that most bands could only dream of one day exhibiting. They make the kind of records the Beach Boys would have made throughout the seventies if Brian Wilson hasn’t lost his mind – there is pretty much no higher praise I can give. The combination of folky musicianship and exquisite vocal harmony is welcoming and spirit lifting, and some of the individual tracks the album offers – ‘Ragged Wood’ and ‘He Doesn’t Know Why’ in particular – are as good as anything you’ll hear on any other album by any other artist. Brilliantly, the band also look exactly like you’d expect them to – every member looks like the kind of bearded yokel you’d run away from if you met them up a mountain, with the exception of lead guitarist Skyler Skjelset who looks like an innocent traveller the rest of the band have kidnapped. Glorious.