Folk music is time travel. Maybe you didn’t know it, but six men from Seattle know it, and they’re on the road as you read this, raising hairs on the back of necks, spreading the secret of the world in three-part harmony. Skyler Skjelset, Christian Wargo, Josh Tillman, Casey Wescott, Morgan Henderson and Robin Pecknold are Fleet Foxes, the band who made ‘Helplessness Blues‘.
About that time travel. Folk music, as they play it, sums up the best of the last century’s music and gives us a teasing taste of the century to come. In the space of a single song, we might take in experimental jazz, the lightning fingerpicking of the old bluesmen or a runaway rock chorus gallop.
All this the casual listener knows before experiencing Fleet Foxes live. Then they’re out there, on the stage stood front and centre like pillars holding up Petra, and suddenly you don’t feel you know so much as you thought. Their crew, grizzly mountain men of the Old West slipping off their shoes in the dark, give the nod. The band are ready.
Trickling guitar and shimmering cymbals usher in ‘The Cascades‘, a masterclass in instrumental overtures, filling up the vast curves and little spaces of the Apollo with the trill of mandolin and the zooms and ghostly moans of Henderson’s double bass. A short percussion segue courtesy of Tillman, and we blast into the monumental ‘Grown Ocean‘. Track 12 on the CD doesn’t even begin to capture how Fleet Foxes perform this song in concert. Better to compare it to travelling the world. If you’ve visited far-off places, you’ve had moments like this, craning your neck to stare up at temple ceilings, towering statues and natural wonders, lost for words.
Songs from the first record crop up regularly, cheered on by the die-hard Foxfans (maybe they don’t call themselves Foxfans, but this is two reviews in a row they’ve got a mention, so the name could be catching). There’s the harmony hooks of ‘White Winter Hymnal‘ and its constant concert companion ‘Ragged Wood‘; far eastern flavours with ‘Drops In The River‘; the dark flute rumble of ‘Your Protector‘, and that perennial favourite, ‘Blue Ridge Mountains‘.
There are unquestionable highlights; ‘Mykonos‘, played immense and mythic, prompts the Apollo to sing along louder than they normally dare. Most simply mouth the words to every song, imagining that Pecknold is going to dry up any moment and look to a Foxfan for the next line.
It’s the ‘Helplessness Blues’ songs that truly grab the imagination, though. Thousands stand silent as ‘Sim Sala Bim‘ bounces fledgling love affairs and magic rituals off these old walls. ‘The Shrine/An Argument‘ quakes the bones as Pecknold stands hunched over his acoustic guitar, his strumming hand letting rip wild rhythms worthy of Richie Havens. Then ‘Helplessness Blues‘ closes the whole shebang with a fitting sense of wonder.
Maybe this all sounds like hyperbole. Granted, it’s hard to imagine a concert giving off this kind of feeling if you don’t experience it for yourself. It’s no good looking up the YouTube footage somebody recorded from under their coat. It doesn’t matter how good their external microphone is; nobody ever caught a wave of musical euphoria off an internet bootleg. Sure, they can try, but why bother? Twenty-odd pounds is little enough to ask for a ticket to go see the band who travel through time.
(Simon Moore)