The Pub

Indie Music Is Singing You A Love Song

Nikolai Tomlinavich

“Say It Ain’t So” by Weezer is the first song I liked. I was thirteen at the time, home schooled, and just a tad bit sheltered, so it took me the longest time to hop on to any sort of rock bandwagon. Listening to it made me feel more alive somehow, made the world sharper and more piquant than listening to my parent’s Michael W. Smith tapes. I didn’t know anything about lead singer Rivers Cuomo or the garage-nerd rock movement of the early nineties. I just thought the music rocked.

From those simple power pop beginnings I stumbled onto Indie music, and everything changed. I discovered the thrill of hunting for obscure bands and one-upping my friends for Indie cred (Oh, you haven’t heard of them? Really?). I loved going to shows where I found myself adrift in a sea of flip-jeaned, flannel wearing scene kids, who rolled their own cigarettes, ate vegan, and had fierce, nay, messianic beards. Now, I certainly like music (and all the more so when no one else has ever listened to it), but sometimes it seems as if I spend more time classifying or judging bands than I do actually enjoying them.  Enter the Fleet Foxes.

The Seattle fivesome’s self-titled debut is a harmonized cry in the wilderness to a music culture diseased by hipster elitism and “I Kissed a Girl” induced nausea. Simple and beautiful, the album has both the unadorned grace that Indie music does so well, and the easy-to-love pop accessibility that the scene tends to shun.

Many bands spend so much of their time finding glockenspiels or vintage guitars to accessorize their sound that they forget about the timbre of the human voice. The Fleet Foxes do include several exotic instruments (notably a Chinese Guzheng on “Heard Them Stirring”), but their voices always take the forefront. This displays the Foxes wonderful mastery of vocal harmony and layering; the drums, guitars and exotic instruments are all there, but the harmonies rightly steal the show.

The tone of the album is moody and rich, fitting for a band that claims the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and northwest mountain ranges among their muses. The Fleet Foxes build each song (save for Pecknold’s solo numbers) on a base of earthy acoustic guitar work accented by lead guitarist Skyler Skjelset’s airy melodies and the subdued drumwork—all that brought together under ghostly harmonies.

The crackly barbershop croon of “Sun It Rises” begins the album with the flowing harmonies that characterize the Fleet Foxes’ music. The drums and guitar are laidback, quality Indie-folk fare, but the harmonies make the music immediate and listenable.

The album’s jewel of a single, “White Winter Hymnal,” illustrates this beautifully. The song is a crisp six-line poem carried for two and a half minutes by breathtaking harmony:

I was following the pack all swallowed in their coats

with scarves of red tied round their throats

to keep their little heads from falling in the snow

and I turned round and there you go,

and Michael you would fall and turn the white snow

red as strawberries in the springtime.

Add to that bubbling electric guitar, joyful pounding drum work, and you have one of the most enjoyable songs to hit the Indie scene in a long while (you can see for yourself free, and legally so, at Sub Pop’s website here: www.subpop.com/artists/fleetfoxes). “White Winter,” like the four line “Quiet Houses” and the wordless “Heard Them Stirring,” shows a lyrical simplicity that sacrifices none of its folksy grandeur. Tracks like “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” and “Your Protector” strip away the harmonies in order focus on the thready intensity of lead singer Robin Pecknold’s voice.

Between the opening pastoral note of “Sun it Rises” to the simple closing elegy of “Oliver James,” the band manages to create a landscape of considerable depth.  Pecknold’s lyrics leave the music plenty of room to breathe without hampering the album’s dramatic scope.

A lot can be said for the Fleet Foxes’ crafty elements, the way they texture and layer their music, their harmonies, but what makes the band matter is that they are a joy to listen to. Their debut is everything music should be— heartfelt and breathtaking. Listening to them reminds me of the first time I really enjoyed music. The appeal of their music is that it moves beyond boundaries of a scene or genre. You don’t need Indie cred or impeccable taste to enjoy them; all you need is a love of good music. The Fleet Foxes are calling— won’t you please answer them?

Nikolai Tomlinavich is a senior English Writing major from Geneva, IL. In his free time, he enjoys rapping Romantic poetry.