The year was 2008. It was a year, in which a comparatively unknown Band by the name of Fleet Foxes (lead by the Vegan Robin Pecknolds) reflected on their fathers’ music and recorded a self-referential debut album, predestined to become a classic the second it was released. On the album, one could hear resonant guitars and choirs, banjos and mandolins, transforming the Pop of the sixties and seventies from the Byrds and the Beach Boys into a somewhat modern garment of folk. Quickly, this Fleet-Foxes-garment of the modern age – in real life represented by plaid shirts and a big bushy beard – became a trend which was then copied and imitated over and over to express a way of living for the late years of the Noughties. Luckily, in the year 2011, nothing’s really changed about the sound nor the Weltschmerz (pardon my German) of the foxes. »The world outside is so inconceivable / often I barely can speak«, Pecknold sings in the title song Helplessness Blues over the sounds of acoustic guitars. Accordingly, the theme of the album is supposed to illustrate »the fight between who you are and who you’d like to be«. These reflections of the young »doubter« Pecknold might actually be the intellectual tenor, the point zero of the pieces. The sound, however, remains to be wonderfully life-affirming.
Helplessness Blues
