Fleet Foxes second album Helplessness Blues (2011) is a warning to the White Winter Hymnal brigade that if you’re not comfortable with having your love tested before it returns with a renewed resilience then perhaps it’s safer if you give up on music right now.
From the lush beginnings of Helplessness Blues (2011) it’s clear that chief fox Robin Pecknold is more dominant than the sum of his band’s parts. As that first gentle guitar strum that lifts “Montezuma” my mind can escape to the mountains, a place I’ve not been enchanted with since John Denver’s “Calypso”.
The glorious harmonies and rich olden time choruses are still everywhere but nothing you hear has made the arrangement without Pecknold’s seal. Even in the most simple arrangements ("The Shrine / An Argument") the light twang of the sub-continent is overwhelmed when Pecknold stretches his vocal chords, irrespective if only slightly.
By the time the title track “Helplessness Blues”, I determined to be a part of the ever more mysterious and at times magical world Pecknold creates for the album to live within.
It seems as if Pecknold's rise is beginning and will be at the expense of the collective as his strength highlights the relative weaknesses of his contemporaries both within and outside of his band.
One thing is for sure, Pecknold’s escaping… with or without you or any of the foxes for that matter.
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