Fleet Foxes
Fleet Foxes are a quintet from Seattle, signed to Sub Pop in the US and Bella Union in the UK, a formidable pairing that pretty much guarantees greatness. The five of them – Robin Pecknold, Skye Skjelset, J Tillman, Casey Wescott and Christian Wargo – are friends from childhood, each of them learning how to play the acoustic guitar at the same time as the others.
They didn’t pay much attention at school. They paid a lot more attention to their parents record collection. Thankfully, it was a really good one, consisting of the works of The Beach Boys, The Zombies, Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Fairport Convention, Bob Dylan, Love, and a load of other brilliant junk. One of the band is even named after a Steely Dan record.
In 2006 they stopped covering the songs of those aforementioned heroes and, taking Robin’s lead, started writing and demoing their own in their basement. They got pretty good at it; good enough to record a proper EP’s worth of original Fleet Foxes material for the first time. This came first in the shape of the Sun Giant EP, and most recently a beautiful self titled album, recorded in the same basement with family friend Phil Ek on production duties. At the time of writing, it’s been available in shops for the past four hours. Best get to one.
FLEET FOXES ON SUB POP: Download a free MP3 of ‘White Winter Hymnal’, the most gorgeous track on an album full of decidedly gorgeous tracks, courtesy of the band’s US label.
FLEET FOXES ON MYSPACE: A very generous thirteen tracks to stream – which is basically the entire new album. What crazy times we live in eh?
SUN GIANT – WHOLE EP STREAM: The band’s debut EP available to listen to in its entirety.
SUN GIANT – REVIEW: “This lot are no pop wimps, and they’re not about to pander to your every expectation. The result of this is that their compositions are full and ready to be listened to again and again…”
FLEET FOXES SIGN TO BELLA UNION: How we reported the band’s signing to their UK label.
WHITE WINTER HYMNAL [MUSIC ONLY]:
YOU’RE SO IMMATURE: