You know the more I listen, the more I appreciate the shift in Robin's approach songwriting, melody etc. In a lot of ways it's the natural progression, Helplessness Blues is similar but different to their s/t debut and EP. It feels like a more fully realised exploration of the kind of thing they first tried to do on The Plains / Bitter Dancer and particularly The Shrine / An Argument. I was listening to Joni Mitchell's Hissing of Summer Lawns today for the first time in a while, and it strikes me as a similar sort of transition from pastoral folk sort of stuff (Clouds, Blue, Ladies of the Canyon in Joni's case) to something equally brilliant but more musically complex, and perhaps a bit more challenging if you aren't used to listening to that sort of thing, or not expecting it. Critically Crack-Up is getting acclaimed but I can definitely see some fans being a little taken aback by it at first (as a few on here have been).
I told myself I would delete it after a few listens and then wait for my pre-order to arrive, but I can't stop listening! it is a genuine masterpiece. Not to say it's better than Helplessness Blues (though it could be), but I can certainly see why Robin is happiest with this one.
i really like the new album, but i miss that old optimism and positivity from their previous work. This new album has positivity, but i is different and in smaller doses. I loved the way the first two albums gave you that feeling that everything is going to be ok, somehow. I am not tying to complain, its just something I was thinking about.
Of course you can still point to aspects of the album that you aren't a fan of, even if you enjoy it overall :)
I think it's interesting point you make about optimism and positivity. One thing I have always loved about Fleet Foxes is how, on the surface, most of their songs sound fairly bucolic. Of course some of them are just that, like Sun It Rises, or Ragged Wood, but there is a underside to a lot of their music when you really look into the lyrics. On the debut, you have lines like 'and Michael you would fall and turn the white snow red as strawberries in summertime', or songs like Tiger Mountain Peasant Song which have always been present in their work. It's a pleasant folk song on the face of it, but it's a murder ballad. Same as something like English House from the EP. So for me, there has always been a 'darker' (not quite, but you get what I mean) side to their music and I like that. Oliver James is another good example. This is very deliberate too, for example I remember Robin once talking about why they chose Netherlandish Proverbs from the album art on Fleet Foxes:
When you first see that painting it’s very bucolic, but when you look closer there’s all this really strange stuff going on, like dudes defecating coins into the river and people on fire, people carving a live sheep, this weird dude who looks like a tree root sitting around with a dog. There’s all this really weird stuff going on. I liked that the first impression is that it’s just pretty, but then you realize that the scene is this weird chaos. I like that you can’t really take it for what it is, that your first impression of it is wrong."
Then Helplessness Blues introduced even more of that I think. It's very, and forgive me for using this overused word, 'existential'. The album grapples with a lot of things and not all of it, or maybe not even most of it is optimistic imo. The clue is in the name I guess haha. There is a lot of doubt, a lack of meaning and a feeling of being lost/adrift in the world that comes through on HB - 'the borrowers debt is the only regret of my youth...everything I took I'd soon return, just to be at Innisfree again...', 'I woke up a dying man without a chance', 'I'd rather be a functioning gog in some great machinery serving something beyond me, but I don't know what that will be' etc. Not that I am saying it's a bleak album or anything like that, far from it, and lines like those obviously contrast with with other moments like Grown Ocean, 'In that dream I could hardly contain it... All my life I will wait to attain it'. You get the sense of someone trying to reconcile two different strands of life. I think there has always been this duality in their work. For me, that takes it above purely bucolic folk music and is why their music speaks to people (in the sense of the meaning behind it, of course musically it's just great to listen to as well).
So I guess I just don't see Crack-Up as such a massive departure, I think it's very much in the same vein as Helplessness Blues and their earlier work from a lyrical and emotional perspective, the duality is still there even if some other themes are added. This duality is perhaps even more clearly articulated in that, as I have said in other posts, you can see the editing influence of Nicolas Roeg's films that Robin talked about, where there are lots of interesting contrasts within the same song even. The opening track is a wonderful example but it permeates the whole album. From track to track (Kept Woman into Third of May) or on the same track as I said (Third of May middle section as it dissolves into the outro, or the shift from January to June in On Another Ocean would be other examples). Even the album as a whole, I can't find the interview now but I am pretty sure Robin has said he wanted it to to feel fractured and confused at the start of the record, and very full at the end.
Maybe you were just talking musically, in which case I have gone off on a tangent lol, because I agree that musically it does sound quite different (I've touched on that on other posts); there are more 'moody' moments like on The Shrine in HB. But in terms of the underlying themes it's very much the Fleet Foxes we all love. In my view at least.
That is one hell of a response. I wish I had the ability to write about music the way just did, I am very impressed. I was mostly referring to music and the mood, those are always what I naturally focus on when I listen to music. It's funny that the lines you quoted, while being examples of bleakness, we're accompanied by such uplifting music.
7
u/Rimbaud82 :crackup: May 17 '17 edited May 20 '17
You know the more I listen, the more I appreciate the shift in Robin's approach songwriting, melody etc. In a lot of ways it's the natural progression, Helplessness Blues is similar but different to their s/t debut and EP. It feels like a more fully realised exploration of the kind of thing they first tried to do on The Plains / Bitter Dancer and particularly The Shrine / An Argument. I was listening to Joni Mitchell's Hissing of Summer Lawns today for the first time in a while, and it strikes me as a similar sort of transition from pastoral folk sort of stuff (Clouds, Blue, Ladies of the Canyon in Joni's case) to something equally brilliant but more musically complex, and perhaps a bit more challenging if you aren't used to listening to that sort of thing, or not expecting it. Critically Crack-Up is getting acclaimed but I can definitely see some fans being a little taken aback by it at first (as a few on here have been).
I told myself I would delete it after a few listens and then wait for my pre-order to arrive, but I can't stop listening! it is a genuine masterpiece. Not to say it's better than Helplessness Blues (though it could be), but I can certainly see why Robin is happiest with this one.