Events

Fleet Foxes
Back in 2011, all eyes were on Fleet Foxes as they released their second full length, Helplessness Blues. It’s the only album they’ve made that features Josh Tillman (A.K.A. Father John Misty) on drums and backing vocals, and most agreed it was a solid-if-slightly-underwhelming follow-up to their stellar, gold selling debut, released three years prior. In hindsight, the album is even better than it initially seemed. The hype machine had gone into overdrive about the Foxes debut, which can lead to a lot of second guessing and self-doubt. Original sessions for Helplessness Blues were scrapped; the pressure cost main lyricist/front man Robin Pecknold a long term relationship. Listening to it now, the title track is downright prophetic. ” I was raised up believing I was somehow unique / Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see / And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be / A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me,” he croons in the first two verses, summing up a dilemma that’s become much more centralized in the seven years since its release. Indeed, Pecknold tapped into something that’s since become a national (argument?) conversation. And then, in one sweeping lyrical gesture, he rejects the whole snowflake-model, aspiring instead to be a man among men, a worker among workers—a bozo on the bus. “If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore” he sings during one of the tune’s more hair-raising passages. No wonder, then, that once the world tour in support of Helplessness Blues concluded, Fleet Foxes went into deep hibernation. Curiously, Pecknold enrolled at Columbia to study English (alas, a snowflake-y thing to do for a guy like him), and did some traveling, but in 2016 he put his studies aside to begin working on Crack-Up, which finally dropped on Nonesuch last summer and brings Fleet Foxes to Artpark on Friday, July 27. Crack-Up is ambitious and sprawling, full of references to history and elements of classic literature (and is named after an F. Scott Fitzgerald series of essays), but it’s goose-pimple heaven for fans of the band’s folksy harmonizing, which references classic crooner-groups like The Beach Boys and CSNY, channeled through the indie-pop notions of something more like The Shins. Crack-Up expands on this template, preserving the elements that have made the band so beloved while also throwing structural conventions aside and allowing for a more meandering approach (the lead track, “Third of May / daigahara,” clocks in just under nine minutes) — but it’s all time well spent, and the critics were mostly kind in the wake of its release. Listeners have to work a little harder for the payoffs, but they’re there, often at the end of a repetitious, churning groove; although still folk-based at the core, these are more like proggy, acoustic suites than simple folk songs. The parallels to be drawn between the F. Scott Fitzgerald essays (and what he was going through personally at that time) and Pecknold’s dilemmas, both personal and political, are many. There’s a large rabbit hole and a maze of corridors to get lost in exploring them, should you feel the urge. Meanwhile, Friday’s show begins with a set from U.K. singer/songwriter Nilüfer Yanya.