Fleet Foxes : Fleet Foxes : Review : Rolling Stone

Indie rock is undergoing a folk renaissance, which has spawned some great harmony singing. Case in point: Fleet Foxes' debut opens with a woozy a cappella that's part sacred-harp-choral tradition, part Beach Boys, and it resolves into a Celtic-flavored march with a searing Richard Thompson-style guitar line. The 11 songs are mostly pastorals — the sun rises, snow falls, spring comes, birds fly and, on "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song," the "tall grasses wave/They do not know you anymore." (Dis!) This style is what critics used to label "freak folk" before the term became verboten, though plain freakin' lovely is more to the point. A lower-dosage Animal Collective, the Foxes stuff their free-form songs with rich, swirling melodies; billowing clouds of organs, tom-toms, bells and assorted stringed instruments cloak group vocals whose secular-gospel, suede-fringed precision owes plenty to Crosby, Stills and Nash (check out the gorgeous intro to "He Doesn't Know Why"). The lyrics are haunted by mortality — one song finds the singer "staggering through premonitions of my death," and another's narrator finds a drowned child on the banks of a river — but the exquisite voices thrum with life.