Album Review: Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues

On the surface, Fleet Foxes should surely be a lot harder to like than they are: they’re deeply uncool, they all have beards, they refer to songs as ‘jams’, and they seemingly don’t own any records made after 1975. It all sounds discomfortingly like the stuff of eighteen-page Mojo feature articles. And yet, nothing so simple as the sheer prettiness of their music is enough to trounce all these obstacles; when the likes of 'Mykonos' and 'White Winter Hymnal'’s superabundance of melody drips from the speakers, it’s impossible not to fall under their spell.
 
That melodic prowess drove their 2008 self-titled debut all the way to number three in last year's RW Albums of The Decade poll, and following it up has been no picnic, if reports prior to Helplessness Blues' release are to be believed. On the evidence of these dozen tracks, however, if it was hard work then it has certainly paid off. One trick the band were never going to be capable of repeating from that first LP was the sense of the listener being bowled over by the breathless beauty of the vocal harmonies; worry not, they’re still beautiful, but they are now also familiar. They’re also not the only thing that’s familiar – indeed, there’s precious little here to scare off fans of the debut, while newcomers will surely  be smitten. All the other elements that went together to make Fleet Foxes so great are once again present and correct: the loose, rolling song structures, the pastoral lyrical reveries and the meticulously crafted, woody sound. Granted, Robin Pecknold and his cohorts might not have taken too many risks here, although when they do unexpectedly drop in a skronking free-jazz trumpet section during the outro to the sprawling 'The Shrine/An Argument', it sounds simply fantastic.
 
If this sounds like faint praise, then suffice it to say these songs are so gorgeous that any initial half-formed reservations simply melt away. On listening to 'Montezuma', the opening track here, you’re left wondering how a song could possibly be any prettier; the title track is equally magnificent: powered by a fiercely-strummed acoustic guitar, it suddenly switches tempo in the second half, Pecknold singing "If I had an orchard / I’d work 'til I'm sore...". The sense of a band that's neither of this time nor simply rooted in the past is palpable – it’s not too dissimilar from the atmosphere created by Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther.
 
Bands that deliver fully-formed classic debuts these days (The Strokes, Interpol) more often than not struggle to evolve thereafter. In this context, Fleet Foxes have held a similar line to The Strokes in delivering a sophomore record that's of a piece with their first. More than that, it’s a thing of undeniable beauty, a collection of songs that are bound to reach a very wide audience.