TAKE A CRACK AT IT
The Fleet Foxes get introspective with a poetic album that explores the bounds of togetherness, Andy Gill says
Fleet Foxes, Crack-Up
Download: I Am All That I Need/Arroyo Seco/Thumbprint Scar; Third Of May/Odaigahara; Fool’s Errand; I Should See Memphis
Possibly the most self-effacing (successful) musician I’ve ever interviewed, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold couldn’t imagine fans wanting anything more from the band after 2011’s Helplessness Blues, and consequently retreated from the music world for several years. Part of the hiatus was spent studying at Columbia University, a move that has not exactly moderated his earlier tendency towards abstruse intellectualism and hifalutin classical/historical allusions.
Quite the opposite: Crack-Up is replete with references to Roman treachery, American Civil War battles and Goya paintings, while a pair of successive tracks are stiltedly titled “Cassius –,” and “– Naiads, Cassadies”. And just when you think a song is finished, it usually sprouts a contrasting instrumental section, if not an entirely different sub-song, to conclude. Take the opener “I Am All That I Need/Arroyo Seco/Thumbprint Scar”, where Pecknold’s quite, murmured vocal and desultory guitar is suddenly assailed after about a minute by rousing Mumford-esque folk-rockery, thereafter switching back and forth between contrasting vocal “characters”, one just wanting to sleep, the other demanding a steelier regard for the world beyond.
This Janus-faced, schizoid attitude suggests one interpretation of the album title, as the singer’s extrovert, bandleader past attempts to surmount his introvert, academic inclinations. Similarly, “On Another Ocean (January/June)” surely reflects upon his move from Seattle to an East Coast college, a journey of which he eventually realises, “Wherever you run, you see all you leave behind you lies inside”. Throughout this intensely poetic, introspective album, currents of guilt, regret and resolution battle in quiet turbulence, the group’s trademark harmonies and acoustic folk settings augmented with additional sonic strata, from the closing coda of piano, woodwind and strings riding the martial beat of “Cassius, –”, and the gentle, burnished swells of brass and wispy violins left stranded at the end of “Mearcstapa”, to the welter of looming industrial drones and indistinct vocal keening that concludes “I Should See Memphis”. It’s a curious counterbalance, these more expansive, experimental arrangements forcing the songs’ reclusive tendencies out into the open.
Ultimately, Crack-Up is an album about purpose, mutual support and reconciliation, nowhere better expressed than in “Third Of May/Odaigahara”, the complex, nine-minute song quixotically chosen as the first single. The title refers to the Goya painting celebrating resistance to Napoleon; but it’s also, apparently, the birthday of Skyler Skjelset, Pecknold’s bandmate, co-producer and lifelong best friend, separation from whom has clearly triggered the undertow of betrayal and regret coursing beneath the album’s surface. “Aren’t we made to be crowded together, like leaves?” muses Pecknold over miasmic strings, pounding piano and guitar. It’s as if, trapped in the quicksand of fatalism, he’s urgently seeking resolution through the reflection of his life in others: “To be held within one’s self is deathlike, oh I know/But all will be, for mine and me, as we make it”. And as Crack-Up confirms, things often work out so much better when we work with others.
This review first appeared in yesterday’s Independent Daily Edition