The best bargain in music is the new Fleet Foxes EP on sale at Sonic Boom for 4.99. Seriously, this is Seattle pop music that everyone will enjoy. Folk, ethereal, graceful, uplifting, spiritual—whatever, you'll probably get into it.
Songwriter Robin Pecknold has a high airy voice that sounds less strained than Ben Bridewell of Band of Horses fame. I run into Pecknold from time to time at house shows, and he's impressive. We don't speak—I'm not within the inner circle of the downtown musicians—but he's as tall as I am and his Jesus beard and hair create a somewhat ominous composition of young post-hippy folk musician.
Together, the bands sounds like CSNY. Vocal harmonies are going to be huge this year.
The band includes local boys Robin Pecknold Skye Skjelset (of the American Apparel Downtown location), Craig Curran, Nicholas Peterson, Casey Wescott, and Christian Wargo.
Each track prefects a different sorrowful lament at the beauty and wonder of life. Though there is a strong instinct to interpret the album as a hippy ode to nature, the Fleet Foxes constantly distance themselves from past paradigms of folk music and late 60s social politics. The album even includes a rambling (if poignant) statement Pecknold posted in a MySpace bulletin a while back, in which he describes live music to a proxy for the disappearing (or totally disappeared) natural word.
There is a definite, self-conscious problematic to a music that speaks so purely and naturally to a world that is so unequivocally impure, unnatural, modern, etc.
Their MySpace headline currently reads “hey friends, it's just music.” Don't believe it for a second.