Turns out, Portishead had long ago shed their skin. When Third was originally announced, the prevailing consensus seemed to be that folks were: 1) Happy to have Portishead back, and 2) Skeptical about how their formula would translate in 2008. Musically, no dominant trend or theme emerged in 2008, so it makes a perverse kind of sense that one of its best records came from a band left for dead that emerged out of nowhere with a fragmented take on itself.
808S AND HEARTBREAK PITCHFORK FREE
The group shares his sense of dynamics, and Fleet Foxes flows like a river, wild and free but logical, filling what needs to be filled and moving on.
Lead singer Robin Pecknold has a strong, clear voice and knows when to let fly with a drawn-out, impassioned bellow and when to withdraw into the shelter of his bandmates' harmonies. See the way the Fleet Foxes refrain "and Michael you would fall and turn the white snow red as strawberries in summertime" plunges you into the stunning guitar-and-voice counterpoint that blows "White Winter Hymnal" wide open. The lyrics are non-narrative but vivid nonetheless. The Sun Giant EP introduces the band to the world with a just plain pretty a cappella harmony passage that lays their pastoral tendencies bare, while later on the disc "Mykonos" and "English House" show us their muscle and easy way with loose song structures. The threads of Brian Wilson's intricate coastal pop, Appalachian folk, modern indie rock, Grateful Dead jams, and other influences are masterfully synthesized in the band's harmonies and simply orchestrated but constantly shifting instrumental arrangements. They're like two sides of a coin, and equally express the band's mastery of its music, a catchall Americana that takes a wide slice of our popular music's spectrum and pulls it through a reverse prism to create a gorgeous and focused sound of the band's own. Listing Fleet Foxes' debut LP and EP may be awkward, but just feels right.
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