VOICES THIS SWEET MUST GARGLE WITH SALT OF THE EARTH WATER --!--

The Fleet Foxes are a band inspiring endless reference- The Beach Boys, Crosby Stills and Nash, Band of Horses, or "16th Century monks singing at high mass" (?). They aren't without singularity-- sincerity and misery are uniquely collapsed. They are colder, more thankless, and less fanciful than the warm pastoral sounds of the freak folk they forage from, and more glib than their Sub Pop label mates. The result is spiritless spirtuals, more contained than trippy, sharing psych folk's anachronisms and indeterminacy, but ever dismal, evoking (when managing) a fiction in which lives are spent in a perpetual winter, without sex or joy, shape note singing Band of Horses in drafty barns, or carving wooden shoes, contemplating the Mountain, the Tree, or the ever poignant River.

I can't argue with their taste in Flemish painters though. Brueghel is In.