Their first ever Jukebox appearance — and at least one of us liked it…
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[5.27]
Anthony Easton: I became a Christian, and I am studying theology, because I believe in the holiness and necessity of communitarian ethics. There are other ways of seeking cohesion, but as for me, Jesus is the most effective way. I have an enourmous time explaining this to people, for any number of reasons — mostly, I think, because American Xtianity has been seeking the wrong kind of utopias, and the wrong kind of visions. I don’t think that the Fleet Foxes are stealth Christians, but this song about work, and the land, about refusing to be a snow flake and the honour of working as a cog in a machine, hits all of those buttons for me. It is unworkable, in the faux-agrarian reactionary Wendell Berry kind of way, and it being aware of one’s cliches and one’s melancholic traps is necessary, but this at this moment hit me.
[10]
Martin Skidmore: This American folk-rock harks back to loads of acts I like a lot, mostly from the ’60s: Neil Young and Simon & Garfunkel, for instance. Robin Pecknold has quite a sweet and skilled voice, and the harmonies are good. I’m not sure why the song appears to switch into something wetter halfway through, but really there is so little guitar act music that I can tolerate that this was a pleasant surprise, even if it doesn’t excite me a lot.
[6]
Zach Lyon: “I was raised up believing I was somehow unique/like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes/unique in each way you can see.” That’s just about the worst first impression a song can make, which is a pity given how adequate the rest of the lyrics are. And it’s pretty enough, but why must every band that’s built on a specific, insular sound follow up their debut with proggy a-song-in-X-acts bullshit? Cut this off after three minutes and it’s fine.
[6]
Mark Sinker: It isn’t the studied Paul’n’Art harmonies, and it isn’t the well-dropped clues — “dimly lit hall” is very Simon, and the buried sly nod to Norman Mailer (“armies of night”) is as cryptically 1968 as you like, Graduate-virgin sexual anxiety as a faintly self-centred figure for once-topical political dread — so much, actually, as the way the drums sound, politely brushed in, as if a revenant Tom Wilson will later have added them without permission. Turning obscure failure into massive overnight success, and on towards curdled bitterness. All this after the most unpromising opening couplet I’ve heard in a pop song since I can’t think when.
[6]
Rebecca Toennessen: Disappointingly bland / cliched lyrics aside (surely we can find something better than the unique snowflake line?) this is a beautiful, velvety song. Fleet Foxes’ harmonies always get me, and when layered over basic-but-sturdy strumming, I can forgive the less than stellar poetry.
[8]
Alfred Soto: The only people I know who give three shits about the uniqueness of snowflakes are third graders.
[3]
Mallory O’Donnell: I suppose this is meant to sound rousing in a Mighty Wind kind of way, and maybe it just does. But it’s also far too redolent of the kind of easy, misguided Americana that’s been seeping all over the production signature of every indie band this side of the Azores. The lyrics are complete crap, as well — that snowflake line is right out of some poor girl’s Junior High poem. Things improve slightly when shoegaze-psyche gets added to the mix, but then you instantly realize that you’re totally sick of that sound as well.
[3]
David Moore: SO GO BUY A FUCKING ORCHARD ALREADY AND LEAVE US ALONE. God, I can hear their beards growing.
[2]
Jer Fairall: The opening verse comes on too strong–if you’re gonna be this over-earnest, better to ease into it so that lyrics like “I don’t need to be kind to the armies of night / that would do such injustice to you”, when you get to them, can deliver something like the wallop intended, rather than seeming drunk on their own sense of profundity. I’m not sure I’m buying the midpoint shift to a broader instrumental palette, the kind of thing that seems calculated to give their fans something to talk about, but there is some true Simon and Garfunkel-level craft going on here for the most part. Still, the most striking difference between them and the rest of the bearded indie class of 2008-9 (Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear) remains the presence of a vocalist who actually can, and does, sing. Which Robin Pecknold does, gorgeously. In the end, the song’s nature-boy sentiments are a bit too mawkish to make the kind of Powerful Statement that they seem to be aiming for, but I’ll forgive a helluva lot worse when its delivered this prettily.
[7]
Josh Love: If I could convince myself this was a deliberate self-parody, I’d probably give it an 8. Because, man, this song is hilarious. The unique snowflake bit at the beginning is (justifiably) going to get a lot of attention, but then you’ve got “I’d rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery / Serving something beyond me,” which I’m almost positive I scrawled in my bad poetry notebook when I was 14 and had just finished reading Animal Farm. Then we find out that those hoary paranoia cliches – “armies of night” and “men who move only in dimly-lit halls” – are apparently working overtime to render this mean old world “inconceivable” to our harmlessly stoned narrator. So of course he retreats into idyllic hippie reveries about working in an orchard while his equally dim, golden-haired lass waits tables. You know, if only there were more orchards to work and tables to wait in Egypt, things over there wouldn’t seem so “inconceivable,” maaaaaaaaaaan.
[2]
John Seroff: It’s been nigh on fifty years since the early sixties folk revolution and trying to imagine “Helplessness Blues” as a contemporary and vital link in that chain is very very hard. More than anything, the lack of innovation at the heart of this stylistic gloss (“If I had an orchard”/ I’d apple all the day?) makes me fear for the world we’d have if Dylan had set his own aim at a similar target, aping half century old corny rags and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”. “Helplessness” is a not-altogether unpleasant riff on the “searchin’ for what I’m supposed to be in an indifferent world” schtick that AnCo did so well last year, but I can really only take so much privileged navel gazing before I’m compelled to rmde.
[5]
