It’s almost a decade since Fleet Foxes’ landmark set at a hushed but heaving Glastonbury.
Acknowledging his terror of large crowds, to settle his nerves main Fox Robin Pecknold kidded along with the massed banks of onlookers by giving them a brief rendition of George Michael’s Freedom while he and the rest of the band won countless new friends with pin-drop renditions of White Winter Hymnal, Sun It Rises and Oliver James.
The ensuing years haven’t always been kind to them; a period of turmoil partially created by the unexpected success of their eponymous first album encompassed the departure of drummer Josh Tillman and a lengthy hiatus following the release of its follow up, the knotty and more abstract Helplessness Blues.
Both that and 2017’s Crack Up were structurally bound up in one man’s thoughts, artisan vessels of doubt with occasional flecks of dazzling relief. This makes the exercise of returning to the band’s origins both timely and fascinating, with this box-set comprehensively documenting their early recordings.
Listeners should need no introduction to either Fleet Foxes or The Sun Giant, both essential and neither short of the spiralling harmonies, sepia tones and bucolic storytelling which made them so revelatory. Even at a distance however, the likes of Mykonos and Your Protector can still scatter birds and prompt lusty bathroom mirror renditions.
Of more interest to fans will be the first vinyl issue of the band’s debut EP, available initially only at their early gigs. While the format is new, the songs are of course not. However, the noticeable gap between their harmonic folk and the half a dozen essays in parlour indie here is one that deserves revision, especially given the lesser reliance on gentle acoustics. It’s also possible – just – on songs like So Long To The Headstrong and In The Hot Hot Rays to hear the tangential influences of British new wave (specifically Orange Juice and Aztec Camera), but it’s Icicle Tusk that forms the obvious bridge between that sound and the soon to be metamorphosis.
The fourth part consists of a clutch of b-sides and rarities which dedicated file sharers will already have long bagged but Silver Dagger, regardless of how many torrents, remains peerless, Pecknold’s voice across the quivering high notes an instrument itself. There’s whimsy too amongst the poise and pathos; False Knight On The Road is a versioning on a classic old English ballad, White Lace Regretfully a string of prose as if from a yellowed notebook, but the diversions and unassuming folly only serve to underline the impression that these sketches are ones many a songwriter would see as the apex of their careers.
Pecknold recently has more than hinted at darker reasons for Fleet Foxes’ time in the wilderness, ones that have seen him battling demons that are as implacable as they are eyes on the soul. It seems like a lot of things have happened since that afternoon in Somerset almost ten solstices ago, but these songs and tales by graceful immortality are tokens of what already feels like a golden age.
