The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Fleet Foxes · produced by Phil Ek with the band · songs by Robin Pecknold · Sub Pop and Bella Union · eleven tracks
Mode
Indie rock turned toward pre-rock communal singing; voices in close harmony over acoustic and electric guitars, mandolin, keyboards, bass and drums
Mythos
An imagined older countryside outside time: the morning sun, mountains, winter, the mourner at a grave, the elder brother calling the younger home, the grandfather’s table
Phase
Eleven songs opening on unaccompanied voices at sunrise and closing on one voice left alone in the rain after the band has fallen away
Presentation
Album; eleven tracks in one sequence, about forty minutes, most of them suites of two or three sections that do not return, the sleeve Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs
Register
Bright, grave and spacious; massed voices in a large reverberation, a clear, strong lead voice at the front of the group, spare guitar and voice on the quiet tracks
Scale
One band, one writer and lead singer, one producer; eleven songs
Governing Proposition
A young Seattle band’s first album brings rounds, hymn singing and songs in several sections that do not return into the indie rock of 2008, with voices in three to five parts placed at the centre and a large reverberation for their hall, and its eleven songs of mountains, winter, a grave and a wandering brother make community audible before they describe it, passing in one arc from many voices at sunrise to one voice left alone in the rain; what they disclose is chiefly a mood, a longing for a belonging older than the singer, rendered with a beauty that holds.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens before any instrument. Voices enter alone, in harmony, unaccompanied: a sound of morning, several people singing in one large room, and only after them does the band come in, so that its first entrance is a lift. The opening sets the terms of everything that follows. What this record knows it knows through voices together, and it lets the listener hear a community before it says a word about one. The song’s title names the hour, and the whole album will move from this morning of many voices to an evening of one.
Fleet Foxes is the first full-length album by Fleet Foxes, of Seattle. It was released on 3 June 2008, by Sub Pop in North America and by Bella Union in Britain and Europe, and produced by Phil Ek with the band. The songs are Robin Pecknold’s, and he sings lead. The sleeve reproduces Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs of 1559: a crowded village acting out its sayings, chosen for a record that sings as a village. Some later editions packaged the album with the band’s earlier Sun Giant EP, a separate release that is no part of the work judged here.
There are eleven tracks, about forty minutes in all. Few are built of verse and chorus. Most are suites of two or three sections that do not return to where they began: “Ragged Wood”, “Quiet Houses”, “Your Protector”, “Blue Ridge Mountains”, “Oliver James”. Two are a single strophe repeated, “White Winter Hymnal” and, more loosely, the wordless “Heard Them Stirring”. The voices sing in three to five parts on almost every track, over acoustic and electric guitars, mandolin, piano, organ and other keyboards, bass, drums and hand percussion, and a large, live-sounding reverberation lies over all of it.
Movement II
The second track is one stanza and nothing more. It is sung as a round, and as the voices enter one after another the single stanza becomes a crowd. There is no second section and no need of one; the shortness is the form. Its words are a winter scene, a pack of friends in the snow with “scarves of red”, and a fall that reddens the snow: a nursery rhyme with blood in it, set down lightly and left there. The song has gone further than any other on the record, and its rounds have been taken up by choirs and a cappella groups, which is a return to the material itself.
What the record brings into the open is here in small. It is a condition more than a statement: a young man’s longing for a belonging older than himself, carried in the sound of many voices placed in one hall. The harmony is the community and the reverberation is the room that holds it. Because the disclosure lives in that sound, the form cannot be changed without losing it. Set the same songs for one lead voice with backing and the melodies would survive while the knowledge went. The record knows belonging the way a congregation knows it, by singing it.
The disclosure has a limit, and the record’s own manner sets it. It prefers image to statement. The lyrics are often oblique, the pastoral is more mood than condition, and what most listeners carry away is the feeling of the harmonies, not a truth about lives that could be stated and tested. That is a real gift, rendered with great beauty, and it is a mood. Where the words come forward, in the songs of the brother and at the graveside, they point toward something that holds, and those songs lift the whole; but they are few, and the record is content to let the voices speak for it.
Movement III
The fourth track strips the record to one man and a guitar. A mourner stands at the grave of a friend and asks how the body can die, the oldest question of the ballad, without any modern frame around it. It reaches the grave, quiet height of a hymn sung alone, and it is one of the two places where the record builds its myth rather than evoking it: the singer becomes a figure from a ballad, and the particular grief is kept particular.
Around it the record’s heights are many. The turn in “Ragged Wood” from its galloping first part to its slow second is a real arrival, and the song does not go back; it is a passage, a walk through country rather than a circle. “Quiet Houses” builds toward a repeated chant, and its long close is transport by repetition, earned because the whole track has been walking toward it. The height comes often. It is nearly always of one kind, the beauty of massed voices in a reverberant space, and the record has little terror or grandeur. “Meadowlarks” and “He Doesn’t Know Why” stay level.
The making is of a high order in the voices. Three to five parts are placed so that each line can be heard inside the mass; the rounds tighten without blurring; Pecknold’s lead voice, clear and strong across a wide range, stands at the front without leaving the group. The reverberation is used as an instrument, the hall the community needs. The joins between sections are clean. Beside the voices the instrumental writing is plainer, the drums often merely driving, and the uniform reverberation that is the record’s strength also flattens its palette, so that the fourth, sixth and ninth tracks sit in nearly the same sound.
Movement IV
The tenth track begins on a piano and then rises into the fullest singing on the record. It is a song addressed to a brother who has drifted: the elder speaking to the younger at night, calling him home, with fear and tenderness both. “He Doesn’t Know Why”, earlier, addresses the same brother, less sharply. Here the call is built. The particular brother stays particular, and the elder’s voice takes on the shape of an old figure without losing the person who sings it. With the graveside song, this is where the record’s myth is constructed and not only summoned.
Elsewhere the materials are archetypal and mostly atmospheric: mountains, the morning sun, winter, woods, wanderers, the peasant and the hymn, the grandfather’s table. The sleeve places all of it inside Bruegel’s village, and the songs live in an older countryside that belongs to no particular time. That is the record’s world and its narrowing. The natural order is held fully, the family is present and joined to it, death is held at the grave; the sacred is evoked through hymn and round, and community through the form. Labour appears only as the peasant of a title and a made table. The state and history are absent by design.
The inheritance is wide and plain. The close harmonies come from the Beach Boys and from Crosby, Stills and Nash; behind the rounds lie Appalachian and gospel singing and something of shape-note hymnody; the British folk of the late 1960s and the baroque pop of the Zombies and the Left Banke are near; nearer still are My Morning Jacket’s reverberant rock and the folk turn of Midlake. The record’s turn was to place communal singing from before rock, rounds and songs in several sections at the centre of an indie album in 2008, with almost no irony. It was a real swerve from what surrounded it, made with proven parts on a debut’s stake.
Movement V
The record ends where it began, but reversed. In “Oliver James” the family table and the grandfather’s handiwork have gone, the singer is “washed in the rain”, and at the last the band falls away and leaves one voice alone. After a morning of many voices the record closes on the one, and that close is the purest height of the eleven. Between the two ends the middle of the second side, from “He Doesn’t Know Why” to “Meadowlarks”, follows by contrast more than by necessity; perhaps a fifth of the record is permitted rather than compelled. But the arc from the many to the one is the record’s shape and its meaning.
The album was widely named the album of its year by the critical press, and it showed that massed harmony, forms older than rock and a pastoral without irony could carry an indie record. The harmony-led indie folk of the next years leaned on it, The Head and the Heart and others of the Pacific Northwest among them, and the commercial folk that followed took its surface more than its method. Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, released months earlier, shared the moment. Eighteen years on the record is whole, in print and widely heard; its large reverberation, much imitated since, now sounds of its time, and the songs beneath it have dated less than their dress.
Beside it on the desk, Illinois stands at 8.1 and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea at 8.2, each the more original record and the one with more to disclose; m b v, another record of one sound, stands level at 7.7. What holds Fleet Foxes below Tier IV is what it chose: a mood more than a meaning, a swerve made of proven parts, a law kept across a narrow range, an older country placed outside history. What it holds within those choices, the sound of a community singing in one room and then of one voice left, it holds with a beauty that has lasted.
Act III · The Twelve
Eleven tracks in about forty minutes, and the subtractive test finds little to take inside the songs. The forms in several sections are lean: the turn in “Ragged Wood” from gallop to slow song is the song’s turn, not padding, and “Quiet Houses” earns its long repeated close because the whole track has been building toward a chant. “White Winter Hymnal” is one stanza and nothing else, and the shortness is the form. The test bites in the second half. “Heard Them Stirring”, wordless, could go with little loss, since the opening and “Quiet Houses” already show the voices as texture; “Meadowlarks” is the slightest song; “He Doesn’t Know Why” says again, less sharply, what “Blue Ridge Mountains” says of the brother. Perhaps a fifth is permitted rather than compelled. The cap is cleared by three tenths.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the record brings into the open is real and is mostly a mood. Through sound, credited as fully as statement, it discloses a condition: a young man’s longing for a belonging older than himself, carried by voices in harmony in a large room, so that community is heard before it is described. Where the words come forward they point at something that can be stated. “Blue Ridge Mountains” and “He Doesn’t Know Why” address a brother who has drifted, with an elder’s fear and tenderness; “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” stands at a grave and asks how the body can die. These particulars of loss and kinship hold. What holds the axis is that the record prefers image to statement, and what most listeners carry away is the feeling of the harmonies, not a truth about lives.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes often. “Sun It Rises” opens on unaccompanied voices, a sound of morning, and the band’s first entrance is a lift. “White Winter Hymnal” stacks its round until one stanza becomes a crowd. The turn of “Ragged Wood” to its slow second part is a real arrival. “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” reaches the grave, quiet height of a hymn sung by one man at a graveside; the close of “Quiet Houses” is transport by repetition; “Blue Ridge Mountains” rises from its piano opening into the fullest singing on the record; and “Oliver James” ends on one voice, the purest height of the eleven. What holds the axis: the height is nearly always one kind, massed voices in a reverberant space, with little terror or grandeur.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth is evoked richly and built in two places. The materials are archetypal (mountains, the morning sun, winter, wanderers, the hymn, the brother to be called home), set in an older countryside of no particular time, and most of it is atmosphere. Two songs build. “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” makes the mourner at a friend’s grave a figure from a ballad, asking the old question of the body’s death with no modern frame. “Blue Ridge Mountains” builds the call to the wandering brother, the elder speaking to the younger at night, and keeps the brother particular. “White Winter Hymnal”, with its “scarves of red” and its fall that reddens the snow, is a nursery rhyme with blood in it, evoked rather than built.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The inheritance is wide and plain: the close harmonies of the Beach Boys and of Crosby, Stills and Nash; the British folk of the late 1960s; Appalachian and gospel singing, and something of shape-note hymnody in the rounds; the baroque pop of the Zombies and the Left Banke; and, nearer, the reverberant indie rock of the decade, My Morning Jacket above all, and the folk turn of Midlake. The turn was to bring communal singing from before rock, rounds and songs in several sections into indie rock in 2008, harmonies at the centre, with almost no irony: a real swerve from the indie rock around it. The stake was a debut’s, and every idiom was proven: a new combination and weighting of inherited parts, not a break with any of them.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because it knows belonging through the sound of many voices in one room. The harmony is the community, and the reverberation is the hall that holds it. The song forms are the instrument too: “Ragged Wood” and “Quiet Houses” do not return to their beginnings, so that each song is a passage, a walk through country rather than a circle. The sequence is counted here, once. It opens at sunrise on massed voices and closes on “Oliver James”, where the band falls away and one voice is left; that arc, from the many at morning to the one alone, is the record’s shape and its meaning. What holds the axis: the middle four tracks follow by contrast more than by necessity.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Evidence over eighteen years. The record repays return in its arrangements: the inner voices of the harmonies separate on close listening, and the songs in several sections keep their surprises longer than verse and chorus would. The semantic yield is narrower. The lyrics, oblique and full of images, give a returning listener some new lines to read, but the meaning on the twentieth hearing is close to the meaning on the second: the beauty of the voices and a longing for an older belonging. Critical attention has been steady and admiring rather than searching; no body of interpretation has reopened it, and the band’s later work has drawn more of the commentary on Pecknold as a writer.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is the rock and indie album of the late 2000s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the record showed that massed harmony, forms older than rock and a pastoral without irony could carry an indie album and stand at the centre of its year, and in that it reorganised a part of the field’s sense of what was possible. It did not reorganise its materials, which were all inherited. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was widely named the album of its year by the critical press, and the harmony-led indie folk of the following years, The Head and the Heart and others of the Pacific Northwest, leaned on it; the commercial folk after it took the surface, not the method. Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, released months earlier, shared the moment and divides the credit.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Survival is weighed over eighteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record exists as released, is in print and widely streamed, and is heard as an album. Presence is wide for a record of its kind: “White Winter Hymnal” is one of the best-known songs of its decade’s indie music, and the album is a fixture on lists of the 2000s. The surface is fixed to its moment in two respects: the large reverberation on the voices is a production manner of the late 2000s, since widely imitated and so worn, and the pastoral image of the band became for a time the emblem of a fashion. The songs themselves, built on older idioms, have dated less than their dress.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Command of the recorded medium is high and, in the voices, load-bearing. The vocal arrangements are the record’s making: three to five parts placed so that each line is audible inside the mass, rounds that tighten without blurring, and Pecknold’s lead voice, clear and strong across a wide range, set at the front without leaving the group. The voices are recorded in a space that gives them a hall, and the reverberation is used as an instrument, not a gloss. The joins are clean, in “Ragged Wood” and “Blue Ridge Mountains” above all, and the guitar-and-voice tracks are spare and exact. What holds it below the desk’s albums at 8.7 and above, each load-bearing in every part: the instrumental writing is plainer than the vocal, the drums are often merely driving, and the uniform reverberation flattens the palette.
Score: 8.3 / 10
One law governs the whole: voices in harmony in a large space, singing of an older country, the songs moving forward through sections rather than returning. Take the two most distant elements: the wordless “Heard Them Stirring”, voices as pure texture over a keyboard, and “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song”, one man and a guitar at a grave. They obey the same law: both are communal sound, one by massing and one by the solitary voice that the massed voices imply, and the close of “Oliver James” resolves the two into each other. Nothing breaks the law. What holds the axis is that the range is moderate and the palette largely one palette. Narrowness is not coherence: the record coheres partly by not going far.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. The natural order is held fully: sun, mountains, winter, woods, birds, rain. The family is present and integrated: the brother in two songs, the grandfather’s table and the house in “Oliver James”. Death is held in “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” and touched in “Your Protector” and “Oliver James”. The sacred is evoked through the hymn and the round more than held as a subject, and community is held through the form itself. What holds the axis lowest: labour enters only as the peasant of a title and a made table, and the state and history are absent, the record’s older country being placed deliberately outside time. Three orders held, two evoked, joined by one sensibility longing for home.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime and The Made at 8.3, then The Imperishable at 8.2. Height on most of the eleven tracks, from the unaccompanied voices at sunrise and the stacked round of “White Winter Hymnal” to the graveside hymn, the chant of “Quiet Houses” and the lone voice at the close; vocal arrangements in three to five parts, each line audible in the mass and the reverberation used as an instrument, load-bearing throughout; and a record whole, in print and widely heard after eighteen years, its surface dated more than its songs.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: the natural order, the family and death held, the sacred and community evoked, labour barely present and the state and history absent by design. Then The Unconcealment and The Swerve at 7.3: a disclosure that is chiefly a mood, a longing for an older belonging rendered in sound, the brother songs and the graveside song coming nearest to a statement; and a turn made of proven idioms on a debut’s stake. Then The Bottomless Well at 7.4.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5, by three tenths. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.9, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.2, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6, The Archetypal Deep at 7.5, The Unconcealment at 7.3 and The Swerve at 7.3 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Unconcealment, 7.3, The Swerve, 7.3, and The Bottomless Well, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the album as first released on 3 June 2008, by Sub Pop in North America and Bella Union in Britain and Europe, eleven tracks in their original sequence, about forty minutes, produced by Phil Ek with the band; songs by Robin Pecknold, who sings lead. The Sun Giant EP, packaged with the album in some later editions, is a separate release and context only; nothing on it is judged. The sleeve reproduces Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559). Judged from knowledge of the recording, its lyrics in part and its reception; no recording, sleeve or lyric sheet was in hand, and the words are argued only where they are known with certainty. Songs are cited by title, and no lyric is quoted beyond two fragments of four words or fewer. Facts that could not be verified, among them the band’s members on the record and who played what, the date of the EP, the track lengths and exact running time, where and how the record was tracked, the person to whom the brother songs are addressed, the album’s places on particular year-end lists, particular later acts said to acknowledge it, particular cover versions and the band’s later tours of the record, are not given.