Fleet Foxes outwit the sophomore

“In making this record, I think I finally became totally comfortable with our choice, which is being a folk band.”Wholesale Battery So said Fleet Foxes front man Robin Pecknold, to the online music site Stereogum about the recording of Helplessness Blues, a striking, soulful outcome seemingly of exasperation and fatigue. Valley set, with solemn reverb, woodsy instrumentation and gently placed harmonies, the album is similar in most ways to the band’s eponymous debut from 2008. And yet it seems inevitable that the two records will be intensely contrasted by critics.Wholesale Computers

Some of that comes from the whole “sophomore slump” thing, and some of it comes from the things that Pecknold has been talking about. Actually those aren’t even two different things. The singer-songwriter said he didn’t want to repeat himself from album one to the painstakingly recorded album two. But what can he do? Fleet Foxes have a sound – a church-in-the-forest sound almost too beautiful to be true. (If not untrue, then too precious and too self-conscious at times. The Plains/Bitter Dancer imagines Crosby, Stills and Nash as medieval balladeers). It’s their thing, though, and maybe Pecknold is helpless to change it.

Change is tough. On the lamenting opening track Montezuma, which melodically resembles the Bee Gees’ pastoral Massachusetts, the protagonist frets about adult responsibility and his capacity to think about someone – a fiancée, it seems – other than himself. “Could I wash my hands of just looking out for me?” is the worried self-reflection. LASER POINTERS

Bedouin Dress, a circular bluesy-pop number, is also concerned about a young man’s one-sidedness – a borrower’s debt being the “only regret of my youth.” So troubled in his mind, he mentally retreats to Lake Isle of Innisfree, Yeats’s poem place of rural utopia. wholesale netbook

As for Pecknold and Fleet Foxes being comfortable with their choice to remain a folk band, one assumes they’re talking about musical choices. But maybe not. Listen to the up-swelling and heartily strummed title track, where the dream is to work an orchard. How do you like them apples? wholesale spy camerca

The waltzing Someone You’d Admire initially offers some relief to the album’s subtle tension. “All that I hoped would change within me stayed” is how it starts. But by song’s end, we’re still wondering about the existential crisis.

I can tell you that the album ends with Grown Ocean, which recalls a lighter weight My Morning Jacket and unnecessarily employs trilling flutes. I won’t tell you how the story ends, though, because I don’t know. I’m not sure Fleet Foxes knows either. My advice to them? Keep on playing that folky music, white boy; play that folky music right. wholesale digital picture frame