Fleet Foxes play loudly and intimately at Brooklyn bar basement
July 10, 2008, at Union Hall
By Carlye Wisel
Published: July 14th, 2008 | 1:17pm
What happens when a gaggle of guys in skintight jeans, vests, and plaid shirts play a tiny, sold-out show in Brooklyn? Apparently, not stereotypical indie rock music.
It’s unexpected that Fleet Foxes, the Pitchfork-touted five-piece from Seattle, would create a sound so rooted in the styling of hymns and chorals. But for this folky group, the music is such an amalgamation of classic rock influences and Jim James–like vocals that it’s not only a new take on a familiar sentiment, but a type of band that the 100 or so audience members and their parents both could like.
Thursday night’s crowd, which mostly milled around Union Hall’s library-esque digs instead of catching opener The Dutchess and the Duke’s stripped-down folk, got antsy by the time Fleet Foxes were supposed to play their early show. Their impatience brewed until lead guitarist and frontman Robin Pecknold remarked that the small, dark basement with its shallow stage was “a little more my speed,” referencing their grandiose-by-comparison performance at New York’s Bowery Ballroom the previous night.
Sitting on a tall chair with a water bottle tucked behind his hip, the rumors about Pecknold being sick didn’t seem relevant until a few songs in, when his hacking cough presented itself during a break from singing. But, by the time Fleet Foxes played “White Winter Hymnal,” one of the first of the night and their most notable, his illness was ignorable and irrelevant. The spine-shivering song is so well crafted and brilliantly performed that it seemed almost impossible that he could actually be ill. Fleet Foxes acted as a summation of the reasons why one would even go to see a band perform in person, especially during “Your Protector” and Pecknold’s solo rendition of “Oliver James,” when his voice filled the space so expansively that the mood was created solely by the emotion and emphasis on specific syllables expressed while singing.
Still, in a live setting, Fleet Foxes retain their reverberation, pairing deeply dynamic vocal harmonies with that heavy, echoing expansiveness that makes them stunning. Surprising, though, was the balance of the sound being both overwhelming and intimate. While the music blasting through the speakers was painfully loud (and near intolerable for those standing in front of them), at times, the quick breaks between lyrics were so quiet that Pecknold’s metronome-like tapping was audible.
It wasn’t just the music that retained such intimacies, or the fact that a tenth of the crowd was close enough to almost get hit accidentally by an instrument. The group’s casual demeanor gave the show a vibe oddly similar to that of attending a party at a friend’s house. Besides the intermittent shouting between the crowd and musicians, chatting about There Will Be Blood and having a full conversation with an audience member about Seattle, their drummer made fun of Brooklynites for the tote bag trend, resulting in a humorous crowd reaction and an ironic story of how he packed everything he needed for a month in Europe inside of one.
Sure, all musicians banter and crack jokes, but with Fleet Foxes, once again, it was different. They were nice, and they meant it.
During the encore — which only occurred because people wouldn’t stop cheering until they heard another tune — there was a full shout-versation between him and the audience after a question about hair products led to someone yelling out “Your hair’s better than your voice!,” a burn that everyone seemed to enjoy and wanted to remark out loud about.
The audible nature of the evening took a turn for the worst when during the final song of the night, the low-key “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song,” someone screamed “shut the fuck up!” presumably to chatty attendees. And, even though the ultimate mood-killer would usually phase a band’s frontman, Pecknold just played along, unphased, completely in his own world.
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