Fleet Foxes:Helplessness Blues

8.2/10 dropps
Sub Pop; 2011

In 2008, Fleet Foxes materialized on the scene like a blossomed band, already full-grown and in their seasoned prime. Their previous releases, Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes, were fully realized albums, perfected in many ways. It has been three years since those releases and some fans have grown tired and pessimistic from the long wait, but others will probably look at this hiatus as a much-needed period of working out kinks, to outdo what was already great workmanship. And so Fleet Foxes present us with Helplessness Blues, another ballad-laden harmonizing trek of an album.

You can certainly expect to hear much of the same from the band’s past material. The vocals are soaring, the guitars are strumming and the lyrics are encompassing. Helplessness Blues sticks to one of the staples that made Fleet Foxes famous in the first place: strong narrative lyrics. But the content is a little different this time around. While the music is still sunny and filled with a folk-pop sense of wonder, the themes are—as the title suggests—a little sadder, a little more serious. The first track, “Montezuma,” portrays this change well as lead singer Robin Pecknold sings about looking back on life and contemplating a coming death. You’d think the 25-year-old man had already hit his mid-life crisis but Pecknold sings with such gusto and earnestness that there’s no questioning his sincerity. As his voice abruptly ends the song with, “Oh man what I used to be / Montezuma to Tripoli / Oh man, oh my, oh me,” the speaker of this album suddenly takes form. He is an aged, well-traveled man, and he’s asking a lot of existential questions, wondering if love is real, if people really care and what this life is really all about.

The theme is a constant throughout the album, such as on the title track where a steady acoustic strumming becomes the backdrop to the speaker’s contemplation of being a “cog in some great machinery,” rather than a unique snowflake. The speaker can’t help but continually ask questions (“What’s my name? / What’s my station?”), and his confusion and desire to ask and learn leads to an orchestral-like swell unlike any other moment heard on the rest of the record. On “Battery Kinzie,” Fleet Foxes introduce us to another common image of the “Wide-eyed Walker.” The wide-eyed walker wakes up to find himself dying and his fingers rotting, as he throws a stone at a lover’s window and a stranger at the door gives him no good news. Pecknold sings, “both my eyes are fading,” and he warns the wide-eyed walker not to wander through the dawn. This is one of the moments on the album where Fleet Foxes lyrics take a more direct route. Pecknold seemingly has decided to not leave much up to the imagination.

“The Shrine / An Argument” is a two-part behemoth of a song, showcasing Fleet Foxes affinity for the narrative. The speaker approaches a shrine (“The old stone fountain in the morning after dawn / underneath were all these pennies fallen from the hands of children”; is he at the mall?), and he throws away all his reservations of superstition, tossing his own money into the fountain, “thinking only of you.” And if Fleet Foxes’ narrative style hasn’t become plain to us already, one would have to assume that this “you” is the same one from the window before. The second “Argument” half of the song is a darker section, as his muse drives away in the morning. It begins with Pecknold bellowing out, “Sunlight over me no matter what I do!” and he’s never belted out a line with as much power and lack of reservation ever before. It’s chill-inducing to say the least. The song ends on yet another existential note as the speaker envisions himself being blown to the sea “like pollen on the breeze.”

The band has certainly upheld their reputation for self-proclaimed baroque-pop. Trilling flutes, confident acoustic guitars and rhythmic bass drums abound on this album. That’s not to say they haven’t made some changes, though. Jazzy drums saunter through “The Plains / Bitter Dancer,” and violins and viols have a more prominent status in “Bedouin Dress,” a song that takes their folk sound and interplays it with some middle-eastern qualities. “The Cascades” is an instrumental piece (their first), and it’s filled with finger-picking acoustic guitars, shimmering tambourines, and what sounds like a lute? They aren’t kidding about the “baroque-pop.”

The album moves along on with its more somber tone (but backed by the same sunny harmonization as before). The images stick out like a sore thumb: “Daylight sleeper / Bloody reaper,” “Gold teeth and gold jewelry,” “dust on the window.” Pecknold and his band want you to remember these lines. They should stand out like red flags; and that’s the kind of subtly that they lost from the previous Sun Giant / Fleet Foxes work. Their method is blunter, as if they want to make absolutely sure that you feel the loneliness in the repetition of lines like “I was old news to you then / Old news, old news to you then,” or the desperation in the relentless questions on “Blue Spotted Tail,” such as “Why in the night sky are the lights on? / Why is the earth moving round the sun? / Why is life made only for it to end?” Apparently Pecknold is allowed all the questions in the world but doesn’t really leave much for the listener.
Fleet Foxes have stayed true to their roots. If you liked what they offered before, chances are you’ll like some of what they’re offering now. But this album doesn’t have the same poppy influences they had in the past. Some of the material is a little harder to swallow in one simple take. But like the animal evoked in their name, it’s hard to deny their craftiness. Somehow you feel like they’re always taking you for a ride, lifting you up then suddenly letting you down.

Helplessness Blues is capped off with “Grown Ocean,” another truly narrative song about a dream the speaker had. There’s a gushing of joy, excitement, triumph and change, as the speaker is united with that ever-elusive “you” from before, and it’s all evident through the ecstatic nature of Pecknold’s delivery. The guitars and the drums pound in a staccato rhythm throughout the song as the speaker explains “In that dream, I could hardly contain it / All my life I will wait to attain it.” Pecknold’s voice reflects that sense of uncontrolled happiness. It’s a joyful ending to a rather solemn arrangement- a triumphant and climactic closing. But the blues-y aspect of this album prevails even through the final acapella lines where he pleads “Wide-eyed walker, don’t betray me / I will wake one day, don’t delay me,” because, sadly, for all the bliss that the dream induced in the speaker, the fact still remains—it’s only a dream.
-Robert Miller