In an interview with this publication several years ago, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold was aghast when it was suggested his band’s backwoods image – all scraggy beards, plaid shirts and hippy hair – was part of a wider trend in fashion and music, in which retro ‘hunter chic’ had supplanted leather jackets and trucker caps as hipster signifiers. A man who had evidently never walked down Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Pecknold claimed ignorance of this vogue, insisting Fleet Foxes would look and sound the way they did irrespective of what the cool kids were wearing or listening to.
If that was the case, then Fleet Foxes were surely the luckiest band of all time. Fetching up just as audiences had started to crave music that wore its authenticity like a freshly cultivated wedge of facial hair, their home-spun revival folk was the perfect fit. The Seattlites were hardly outliers: Ray Lamontagne had been embracing the role of deep-woods seer for some time and they would soon be joined by Midlake and Bon Iver, artists who, in music and demeanor, seemed to hark fondly back to the ‘60s – as in the 1860s.
Of them all, though, Pecknold’s crew raised the sweetest din, with music that, by turn, glimmered like morning dew and brooded like storm clouds looming low over Appalachia. A sort of Mumford and Sons for the Chuck Converse set, they were embraced with particular gusto in Ireland, progressing from a headline turn at Whelan’s to several nights at Vicar St. in little under 18 months. At the last of those shows, there was enough reverence in the room to broil a lobster.
Cannily, if slightly predictably, they return with a second album that embellishes all the tropes of their debut without doing a great deal to move things on. Rather than ripping it up and starting anew, Pecknold and Co. have returned to the well, so that, like their first LP, the spectre of British folk revival, Crosby Still and Nash and Simon and Garfunkel hangs heavily – though never oppressively.
You can hear it on harmony-drenched opener ‘Montezuma’s Blues’, in which lush vocals take precedence over instrumentation so bone-bare it feels hardly present. A whiff of far eastern influences seeps through on ‘Bedouin Dress’ though, and by the time we reach the record’s mid-section, tracks have started to blend into one another, resulting in a long soggy jam of over-lapping voices, folksy grandiosity and the occasional intimation of a hook.
Speaking to the press, Pecknold has said Helplessness Blues was a struggle to make. How strange that it should sound like the work of a band in no hurry to exit their comfort zone. Devotees will love every wistful note. Skeptics will remain unconvinced.