Tuesday, May 27, 2008

ARTIST: Fleet Foxes

We hope you had a great Memorial Day weekend. How was ours you ask? Well, we were lucky enough to head out to the Gorge in Washington for the first day of the Sasquatch Music Festival on Saturday, where we saw some great acts like Beirut, Modest Mouse, R.E.M., the National, Grand Archives, Fleet Foxes, The New Pornographers, Destroyer, and more. Then we headed back home in time to catch Death Cab for Cutie and Tegan & Sara at Thanksgiving Point on Monday night. So yeah, it was a good weekend. Expect to hear some more details from both of us in the next few days.

So briefly here's a taste of one of the more pleasant surprises from this weekend. Fleet Foxes opened up the main stage at Sasquatch on Saturday, and actually ended up playing later on as well due to some re-scheduling issues. I had only heard a couple of their songs before that, but they quickly became one of the highlights of the day for me.

Let's just say that this is a band that makes beautiful music. Relying on choral harmonies and backed by sparse but tight instrumentation, they sound almost otherworldly - like some kind of minstrel music from a bygone era. We listened to their Sun Giant EP while driving home from the festival and their beautiful and textured harmonies were the perfect soundtrack for the green Northwestern landscape that rolled past us. It wasn't long before I could confidently dub them "favorite new music of the trip" - quite a prestigious title. In addition to all this, these long-haired Seattle natives were incredibly personable on-stage, and seemed to be just real people with a real love for making music. Now that's something we should all get into.

from their forthcoming album Fleet Foxes (pre-order on Amazon)

2 comments:

bbond said...

where is this picture? is it real? or from star wars?

Tobler said...

I'm really not sure what that's a picture of, actually. It's on the cover of their Sun Giant EP.