duh.blog

Monday August 11, 2008 at 0:46

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

raptoravatar:

barthel:

I decided to give Fleet Foxes the fairest hearing I could. So, I loaded them onto the MP3 player and took a walk on a sunny, breezy afternoon through a bucolic area, up a hill and through a park with crickets chirping and bees bumbling from flower to flower and all that shit. Consequently, I feel like I can now fairly say that the thing I don’t like about them is the vocals. The voices are bland, the harmonies are standard-issue, and the lyrics are horrible. I would like this a lot more if either it was sung by someone with character (indie’s embrace of vocal music always seems to forget how rare and invaluable a strong, distinctive, inventive singer is) and/or if the lyrics were all replaced with “doo doo doos.” Compare the opening here, which is painful, with the ending, which is lovely.

That said, I genuinely wish that the vocals were better, because it’s enjoyable music, for the most part. There are actual songs, and the instrumentation is pretty and pleasant, though some of these songs wouldn’t sound at all out of place in a coffeeshop in the 90s. I like it for the same reasons I like Sufjan Stevens sometimes, an opinion not shared by many who share my general taste, I think. It’s pretty, you know? Not more to say about it than that, but it’s nice for quiet moments when you’re reading or eating.

I think I’ve had the same issue with it. I’ve spun the thing 3 times and it just sort of feels like Bob Ross painting lessons in music form. There isn’t really anything to begrudge about it, in fact there are ways it succeeds that are impressive from a technical and structural standpoint. However, if it’s just about pleasant architecture why does Indie even need to exist? Are Fleet Foxes making pop music that doesn’t own up to its desire to be popular? I might be out of line here (and maybe listens 4 and 5 will be totally sublime) but I can’t help but feel like there’s some X factor missing from this record that would put it on a higher plane for me.

I was thinking about this while on the train back from Long Island today, about how music like Fleet Foxes and other seemingly made-to-be-licensed “indie” increasingly seems only to be really “indie” as far as its up-with-pop-music attitude, i.e., seemingly not wanting to connect with a mass level of people but in reality wanting to connect with a mass of the right kind of people—you know, the sorts of creative professionals who can then get at least one song in an ad. That could speak to the whole “Bob Ross” feeling it gives off; empty prettiness is both the means and the end.

I’ve said this before, but my least favorite musical development these days is what I like to refer to as creative-professional indie: it’s designed to exist in the background, playing at a tasteful volume on the communal work iTunes at some well-designed office where all the men have square plastic glasses and all the women dress just smartly enough to be taken seriously. (This could be why the lyrics have license to be terrible, btw. Who’s paying attention?)

Did I mention that the shrink I saw last week told me I spend too much time in my head? Anyway.