46 Seconds.
When Fleet Foxes first made the title track of this new album available for our eager ears to take in a couple of months ago, 46 seconds was the exact time when that song changed from being something very good turned into something utterly astounding. Since then, it’s felt like an interminably long wait until now when the whole record is available, and a huge increase in the weight of expectation, already massive in the wake of their astonishing debut.
So what to expect? Their debut LP and EP so strongly defined them that following them is a daunting task. What they follow up with is an album similar in spirit but much broader in scope and sound. Where the words have become a lot more introspective, the music has expanded in all directions, with more choral harmonies and broader arrangements featuring more instruments backing the stronger melodies. It’s still very recognisably Fleet Foxes, but the sense of purpose behind the way that the music has turned out is palpable in its desire to move forward, and adds further to its charm.
From the very first listen, it’s apparent that a large influence certainly on the lyrical and thematic side of Helplessness Blues is the work (and particularly the debut solo album) of Graham Nash, whose mixture of making sense of the world and his own time and space within it during strange personal and global times. Robin Pecknold’s words echo Nash’s Songs For Beginners’ sentiments perfectly, beautifully and occasionally painfully as telling lines are delivered without hiding behind metaphor or crypticism.
Much as Josh T.Pearson’s Last of the Country Gentlemen was a gaze into the abyss of real life during hard times, Helplessness Blues takes a similar viewpoint and relation of its findings. Unlike Josh’s record however where he stands alone while he does this, Robin is surrounded by his band who all help to turn a desire to be swept away from wherever he was to WB Yeats’ poetic Utopia, into creating his own Innisfree (a place yearned for more than once during the course of this album) and weaving it around him and us. This doesn’t take anything away from the emotion of the lyrics or sentiments behind them, but turns them into a shared, comforting experience that brings a warmth to the record from start to finish. That said, with the overtly personal nature of the words, the rest of the band and their impressive array of instrumentation and arrangements do for the most part exercise restraint in backing the main voice here, providing the perfect foil for one person in the process of pinpointing themselves in the universe.
So many times in writing this whilst listening to the album, I’ve had to stop typing. The swell of the guitar/mandolin part of Sim Sala Bim, the oppressively-choral intro to The Plains/Bitter Dancer before settling into its own mellow yet driving rhythm (and then again with a delightful tempo increase about 3/4 of the way through), the screamed crescendo of Robin’s voice during The Shrine/Argument (it seems that the “two songs for the price of one” ethos of the last album has extended to the titles on this one) and of course that moment 46 seconds into Helplessness Blues itself. Sometimes it’s such a shame that one can only listen to a record for the first time just the once.
And with Grown Ocean closing this work, Helplessness Blues ends on a glorious high note, positive and far-reaching, as if the yearning and questioning of the previous eleven songs have been suddenly resolved and shrugged off with the dual-voiced “I will wake one day”, as if the understanding dawns that we all have these insecurities and fears and we deal with them by getting up and getting on. A wonderfully upbeat ending to a record that constantly lifts the heart and warms the soul throughout its journey.
46 seconds. Seriously. Try it for yourself.
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