Live Report: Fleet Foxes at the Iveagh Gardens

While their former drummer gallivants about the globe decked out in increasingly stylish tailored suits, performing sunkissed literate 70s pop and wryly decrying the essential fault at the centre of the human condition; Robin Pecknold and the rest of Fleet Foxes have dived deeper inside the panoramic folk with which they originally made their name. New album, Crack–Up, sees the Seattle band stretching and projecting their sumptuous arrangements outwards, like shifting seasons tumbling across an ever–expanding landscape. On record, it’s a sound that’s easy to get lost in, and it should be the perfect soundtrack to a night in the city–centre oasis of the Iveagh Gardens.
The evening starts out strong, with the Foxes setting their stall out early by piling headlong into the opening three songs from Crack–Up. On the six minute triptych, ‘I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar’, the scale of the music is immediately arresting. It’s in this area that Fleet Foxes have always set themselves apart from the other alt–folksters who rose in their wake. The compositions may be intricately constructed and acoustically presented, but at their best they hit you like a wall of sound and their tightly wound close harmonies ghost above it all beautifully. By the time ‘– Naiads, Cassadies’ comes to a finger picked conclusion, it’s already been a marvel to witness how much precision it takes to perform these songs, with instruments being rapidly switched out during and after songs, and multi–instrumentalists Morgan Henderson and Casey Wescott putting in a hero’s shift.
It takes an outing of ‘Ragged Wood’ from their eponymous debut to finally coerce the crowd into joining in on the harmonies, and its opening couplet of “Come down from the mountain / You have been gone too long,” could well be taken as Pecknold announcing his own long awaited return from sabbatical. Unfortunately, it’s only during songs from the debut album and some well chosen cuts from its follow–up, Helplessness Blues – like the excellent ‘Battery Kinzie’ and the undoubted highlight of ‘The Shrine / An Argument’ – that the audience really get to join in on the fun.
With the set weighted heavily towards new and less familiar material from Crack–Up, attentions seem to wander. It’s easy to drift off to Fleet Foxes tunes, blissing out to the melodies, and by design they’re often delicate, wispy things that can be carried away on the slightest breeze. At times this seemed to result in an unengaged and unusually chatty audience, often distracted by more earthly concerns than with Pecknold’s grandiose contemplations of the sublime. However, when they do hit – like on ‘Third of May / Ōdaigahara’ with its sudden ripping squeals of coruscating noise, or on the aforementioned psychedelic shoegaze workout of, “The Shrine / An Argument – it’s really enough to take your breath away. Pecknold’s voice is a thing of beauty, by turns powerful and fragile, and performing solo on ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’, you can easily imagine his lamentations of, “I don't know what I have done / I'm turning myself to a demon,” carrying out over the trees and off down Harcourt Street.

Setlist:

1. I Am All That I Need...
2. Cassius
3. Naiads, Cassadies
4. Grown Ocean
5. Ragged Wood
6. Your Protector
7. Mearcstapa
8. On Another Ocean
9. Fool's Errand
10. He Doesn't Know Why
11. Battery Kinzie
12. Tiger Mountain Peasant Song
13. If You Need To, Keep Time On Me
14. Mykonos 
15. White Winter Hymnal
16. Third of May / Ōdaigahara
17. The Shrine / An Argument
18. Blue Ridge Mountains
19. Helplessness Blues
20. Blue Spotted Tail
22. Crack-Up