Spectreview: Fleet Foxes – Shore

Released: September 22, 2020

Indie Folk
Baroque Pop

-LIGHT CORAL-

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If you’ve haven’t heard it yet from someone this morning, let me be another of millions thinking it: we’ve lost the war. It’s over, and it can’t be ignored. People died, people are dying, and many of us will die at an increasingly similar timing. The air is thick; the brain is rattled. We’re confined to our residences and convinced our neighbors are our enemies. Dread and hatred rule the era. What are you going to do about it?

That’s the question at the core of Robin Pecknold’s magnificent fourth outing under the Fleet Foxes moniker. Recorded in Paris and released in surprise at the autumnal equinox, Shore approaches the oncoming end with a staggering, heartbreaking hopefulness – not that we’ll be able to course-correct, but that we’ll somehow find a way to make the most out of the ending, however it surfaces.

Its buoyancy feels like a direct response to Crack-Up’s single, if grave, misstep. For all its successes, that record vastly overestimated the importance of maintaining relevance in the post-indie world. Its arrangements were labyrinthine and opulent, but its tone was sour and self-aggrandizing, depressive and didactic about the Trump era almost to a point of patronization. (With respect, no one needed a status update about a once-hyped indie band as the country was breaking apart.)

That tonal incongruence is partly why Shore is comparatively so powerful. Pecknold need not point out the wrongs of the day; just a few minutes online, or in your news source of choice, will remind you in due time. So instead he commits to uplift and lets that unceasing doom background, even anchor, his songs.  On the harpsichord-touched “I’m Not My Season” he disconnects from the time and reminds the listener to do the same. “Going-to-the-Sun Road” is similarly bucolic, imagining a golden-years final voyage with the warmth of a backseat ride home. The effect is like a dark cloud passing, or a depressive spell waning; where Crack-Up at most inspired awe, Shore may spur on some ugly-crying.

Yet Shore isn’t irresponsible with the comfort it provides. Its optimism is cautious at best, and Pecknold makes sure not to discount how the times have changed even since his last project. Wisely, he removes himself from the center of the proceedings, giving the first words of the record to the glorious tambour of Uwade Akhere and filling its cracks with the likes of Portuguese singer Tim Bernardes and a young Brian Wilson. When it leans into the political it does so gracefully, acknowledging the entitlement of privilege (“Featherweight”) and paying tribute to the fallen folk leaders of yore (“Jara”). Climate change, that most ominous of threats, inspires one the best songs here in “Quiet Air/Gioia.” The rest is spent lending help, providing solace and, on centerpiece “Sunblind,” eulogizing the dead. It’s all bound by warm, swaddling production that may not be striking on first listen but proves enduring as you return to it.

It’s painful to think that anything as light-footed as Shore feels like a blessing this year. But that’s what this record is: a blessing, intoxicating and nourishing as ambrosia. It’s not pretentious, it’s not overly ambitious, and it’s not trying to distract. It’s just there, aware of the pain and not pushing any further but to lend a hand. Just to hear somebody try and assuage our anxieties or extricate us from the present tense, if even just a moment, may be as much as music can do to help.

Highly recommended for the fall.