Fleet Foxes

Seattle has produced its fair share of decent bands over the last few decades, and a lot of terrible ones too! Fortunately, Fleet Foxes are well and truly adding to the former category. They describe themselves as "Baroque harmonic pop jammers", which makes some kind of sense, I suppose - they are very harmonic, not un-pop and curiously not shy of a bit of baroque-ness...

Annoyingly, I stumbled upon them two days after they happened to play a small-ish gig down the road in Glasgow, which several of my friends went to without telling me! Their debut album, the eponymous Fleet Foxes (well done boys, always good to get to use "eponymous" in a sentence) came shortly after a well received EP called Sun Giant - the two pieces together instantly making them the must listen to band of the moment.

The immediate impression is of something very listenable, that rocks in a very mellow and melodic way - a bit like Kings of Leon if they all calmed down, stopped growling and had some nice herbal tea! Lead singer Robin Pecknold's voice is just hauntingly beautiful (and I hear this is true live also), and there are enough acoustic instruments scattered throughout each track to give it all a very other-worldly feel, which... yes, I'm going to say it: reminds me a lot of the best stuff prog-rock had to offer - early Genesis or Yes, perhaps.

Several goes around later and you are more than hooked on a few tunes and their general vibe in, errrr, general! The first single (track 2 on the album) White Winter Hymnal is just genius! I love it! It reached a dozen on my play counter without any trouble at all and is still notching them up. But it's far from a one trick pony - as is always a good sign, the tracks you weren't so bothered about at first emerge as favourites later on. It is rich and rewarding in many ways - and I predict that by their sophomore album effort they will be unfeasibly popular. Quite simply, one of my favourite albums of the year.