Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop Records, June 2008)

Fleet Foxes is a five-piece Seattle based band signed to the labels Sub Pop and Bella Union. The quintet describe their music as “baroque harmonic pop jams”.

Fleet Foxes toured this spring tour with fellow Northwest band Blitzen Trapper. This is their debut full length album and was released on June 3, 2008. They are the new darlings of the left end of the FM dial and all the associated online stations, and I have to admit, upon hearing them last week in Newbury Comics, I fell in love with them myself.

But some of the comparisons I’ve been reading about them in the media…I mean, the Beach Boys? I *love* the Beach boys, but, honey, please. I am definitely hearing an unholy union of Cold Play and Dead Can Dance here, without a doubt. These songs have the dream-like lost-in-the-woods quality that so many of the songs of both of those bands have. Their music has an almost hymn-like quality to it.

When I purchased this at Newbury Comics, the clerk behind the counter, a pink and blue dreadlocks and hair extensions woman with jangly sets of facial piercings and enough black eyeliner to make bankrupt Siouxsie Sioux and Chirssie Hynde extolled the relaxing nature of the music to me. Stunned by the apparent incongruity, as I was holding a pile of Angelic Upstart bootlegs and an Au Pairs Peel Sessions CD among other loud and anything-but-relaxing music, I said, fanning out my selections, “well, given my taste, that’s not specifically a selling point…but, yeah, this is wonderful.”

And so it is.

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Listen here:
Fleet Foxes – Ragged Wood
[audio:http://www.jukeboxheart.com/screamers/fleetfoxes/ragged.mp3]
Fleet Foxes – Tiger Mountain Peasant Song
[audio:http://www.jukeboxheart.com/screamers/fleetfoxes/tiger.mp3]

So, what makes you scream?