Front Page Reviews & AIR

I’ve spent much of the last few weeks listening to Helplessness Blues, trying in vain to get a good grasp on my opinion of this much anticipated record.  For starters, it certainly doesn’t lend itself well to a traditional “star rating”, so don’t let the rating fool you.  This is an album you definitely want to own – and listen to often.  For anyone who loved the Fleet Foxes self-titled debut (2008), Helplessness Blues will not disappoint.  Robin Pecknold and (growing) company have taken their strengths, refined them, and given us another album full of beautiful melodies, reverb-drenched harmonies, and impeccably tasteful (and often pleasantly surprising) arrangements.  The problem, however (for this reviewer anyway), was that the expectation was for something more.  Part of my high expectation was my own fault, as I had hoped the success of Fleet Foxes would cause the band to weed out some of their less appealing idiosyncrasies in search of a larger audience.  The other part of the expectation was fueled by the band themselves when they released the title trackway back in January. 

The song “Helplessness Blues” is the best thing the band has recorded to date.  The melody is instantly classic, the acoustic guitars driving with infectious energy, the sudden harmonies sublime, with a turn near the end that conjures up such perfect serenity that you just want to live in it for days.  On top of this, the lyrics have a depth not reached on Fleet Foxes.  “Helplessness Blues” manages the difficult, yearning encapsulation of everything it feels like to be a young adult (Pecknold is just 25) questioning his place in the world, with the first line alone evoking so much: “I was raised up believing I was somehow unique.”  Three verses are spent wrestling with these types of questions, with the third verse asserting Pecknold’s best stab at what it all means:

If I know only one thing, it's that everything that I see
Of the world outside is so inconceivable often I barely can speak
Yeah I'm tongue-tied and dizzy and I can't keep it to myself
What good is it to sing helplessness blues, why should I wait for anyone else?

It sounds like a call to action, but the serenity of the song’s last section finds Pecknold retreating into a pastoral fantasy with his beloved:

Gold hair in the sunlight, my light in the dawn
If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm sore

And haven’t we all been there?  Oh, to be young again, wrestling passionately with the meaning of life and still believing in the possibility of somehow just getting away.  Somehow, the evident sincerity of Pecknold’s voice keeps it from sounding naïve.  Instead, it’s all heartbreakingly beautiful.

The problem with pre-releasing a song this good was, of course, that it raised the bar for the rest of the album, none of which lives up to “Helplessness Blues”.  So, basically, my reaction to the album has gone through three phases.  The first was eager anticipation, hoping the album would be like the title track, adding a yearning depth to their already strong gifts of melody and arrangement.  In short, I was hoping for a masterpiece.  This album is not that masterpiece, however.  So my second reaction, then, upon my first couple listens, was disappointment.  Helplessness Blues turns out to be a lot like Fleet Foxes, full of beautiful moments as well as some mildly frustrating indulgences.  However, the high points are higher and the low points fewer and farther between.  And by low points, I mean something that a lot of people (including possibly the band themselves) equate with the identity of the Fleet Foxes, namely their penchant for the clichés of folk music and folk lore.  While folk music is undeniably at the heart of their influences and anchors their ear for melody and harmony, their best moments come when they use these things to create something greater, like on “Helplessness Blues”.  Other times, they seem to fall back on their melodies, content to have folk-cliché lyrics like “I woke up one morning” (the opening of the album’s catchiest folk-pop track, “Battery Kinzie”) or “Green apples grow on my green apple tree / They belong only to, only to me” (“The Shrine/An Argument”).  Then there’s the entire lyric to “Blue Spotted Tail”, which is as clichéd a folk song as there is.  But that’s not to say that they can’t use folk-lore more subtly, and to their advantage, like on “Bedouin Dress”, where they use W.B. Yeats’ “Lake Isle of Innisfree” to evoke the longing for peace and innocence that’s tied to the places of our youth. 

After repeated listens, I arrived at the third phase of my reaction – enjoyingHelplessness Blues for what it is.  As the spring blossoms began to appear, the album revealed itself as the perfect album for those crisp clear mornings after a spring rain.  The opening track, “Montezuma”, has such an achingly sweet melody and sentiment that you can’t help but be drawn in.  I began to look forward to the fingerpicked instrumental, “The Cascades”, and the longing of “Someone You’d Admire”.  In the end, the familiarity of the album brought an intimacy; it started to feel like an old friend.  In this sense, Fleet Foxes are much like one of their biggest influences, Simon and Garfunkel.  Eventually, you tend to find them endearing, in spite of (or kind of because of?) their clunky attempts to evoke Romantic poetry and their willingness to be almost embarrassingly sweet and pretty.  Hey, there are much worse things to be.  Their preciousness can be their strength and their weakness, but in the end, you can’t help but welcome them in.  So, for now, we can enjoy Helplessness Blues as the spring blooms into summer, remembering that the Fleet Foxes are still young, and that they have plenty of time to make the masterpiece that may well be ahead of them.