Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
(Bella Union)
Pretty soon Fleet Foxes will be pretty pissed-off with all the geographical comparisons. Just as Iceland's Sigur Ros can now never be mentioned by journalists without referring to their music's kinship with their homeland, its "glacial beauty" and "geyser like climaxes", so Fleet Foxes will find themselves encumbered with the tag of being a very American band.
Well, they shouldn't have done it then. They shouldn't have made a debut album where every plucked guitar, every joyous whoop and every plaintive harmony sing of a mythical America of gaping canyons, pine-studded mountains and rolling expanses of prairie and desert, all stretched out beneath a giant American sky; and all painted in the colours of the best "B"s of the American songbook: the Beach Boys, the Byrds, (adoptive Americans) the Band.
Opener "Sun it rises" breaks with a dawn chorus of Appalachian barbershop harmonies like, well, the sun rising, before settling into a slice of cosmic Americana: all crystalline Crosby Stills and Nash harmonies and oddly propulsive raga-esque guitars, underpinned by a spectral organ wash straight out of The Band.
"White winter hymnal" suggests a hitherto unknown common ground between Simon and Garfunkel and the Animal Collective, as a harmonised verse gives way to a chorus of giddy vocal "doo"s and, like a jar of fireflies, the song follows its own peculiar internal logic, burrowing its way into your musical subconscious.
The spirit of a countrified Beach Boys is strong - a backwoodsman Brian Wilson, romanticising snowy mountainsides pock-marked with paw-prints rather than Deuce Coupes and surfboards. Refreshingly though, this isn't a Beach Boys influence limited to stacked harmonies, but the expansive, orchestral Beach Boys of Wilson's similar hymn to a mythical America, Smile.
Fleet Foxes captures a romantic vision of America that seems to have been lost somewhere in amongst the Starbucks and Bushes - as broad in scope as the landscape it evokes. Geographical clichés be damned: I'd be happy for my music to be pigeonholed as the soundtrack to a world as magnificent as this.

words by Robin Wilkinson