I decided to give Fleet Foxes the fairest hearing I could. So, I loaded them onto the MP3 player and took a walk on a sunny, breezy afternoon through a bucolic area, up a hill and through a park with crickets chirping and bees bumbling from flower to flower and all that shit. Consequently, I feel like I can now fairly say that the thing I don’t like about them is the vocals. The voices are bland, the harmonies are standard-issue, and the lyrics are horrible. I would like this a lot more if either it was sung by someone with character (indie’s embrace of vocal music always seems to forget how rare and invaluable a strong, distinctive, inventive singer is) and/or if the lyrics were all replaced with “doo doo doos.” Compare the opening here, which is painful, with the ending, which is lovely.
That said, I genuinely wish that the vocals were better, because it’s enjoyable music, for the most part. There are actual songs, and the instrumentation is pretty and pleasant, though some of these songs wouldn’t sound at all out of place in a coffeeshop in the 90s. I like it for the same reasons I like Sufjan Stevens sometimes, an opinion not shared by many who share my general taste, I think. It’s pretty, you know? Not more to say about it than that, but it’s nice for quiet moments when you’re reading or eating.
1 year ago
