100 Greatest Songs of the 2010’s #8 Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues

arcticreviewsblog

Released : 2011

Robin Pecknold won’t be the last person to be catapulted to fame without having the tools with which to process the fallout. His original expectations for Fleet Foxes eponymous debut album were sales of 30,000 worldwide: by the time it was done, they exceeded a million and his band were playing to 20,000 at Glastonbury.

Following it up was always going to be a task full of complexity: successful to an extent because of it’s simplicity, the quintet’s music was perceived as an antidote to perceptions that both creativity and finesse were missing elsewhere, but adding  depth sympathetically proved no easy task.

Because of this and other issues Pecknold stuttered to the extent that Helplessness Blues has taken a long time in the rear view mirror to become fully appreciated: it’s title track blooms however, a rare moment of shackle-free abandonment that sounded wonderful at first play and still does now.

Published by arcticreviewsblog

Hi, my name is Andy & I live in Leeds, in northern England. I've been writing about music for more than ten years. My work outside of this blog is featured on Live4ever and Contact Music.