Fleet Foxes - Shore

  by Zena Grieg

published: 26 / 11 / 2020

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Review

At the moment of the autumn equinox, the Seattle-based folk-rock band Fleet Foxes released their new album, ‘Shore.’ Singer-songwriter and founder member Robin Pecknold said he wanted to make an album that “celebrated life in the face of death”, an album inspired by a plethora of lost musical heroes including Bill Withers, John Prine and Nina Simone. Pecknold named the album ‘Shore,’ after “a place of safety on the edge of something uncertain, staring at Whitman’s waves reciting ‘death,’ tempted by the adventure of the unknown at the same time you are relishing the comfort of the stable ground beneath you. This was the mindset I found, the fuel I found, for making this album.” ‘Shore’, is intended to be the first part of a larger project. Produced with the Grammy-winning engineer Beatriz Artola, this fourth album by the Fleet Foxes, marks a harmonious return to form since their acclaimed self-titled debut album in 2008. With themes covering environmentalism, loss and rebirth, this new fifteen-track collection traces the lineage of this quintet back to the folk-rock of The Byrds. Highlights include the prologue ‘Wading In Waist High Water,’ the intimate vocals of Uwade Akhere, accompanied by a chiming guitar, leading seamlessly into Pecknold’s punchy, uplifting, namechecked homage to musical inspirations, ‘Sunblind’. ‘Going-To-The- Sun-Road’ is a mellifluous, jazzy track enhanced by the Portuguese vocals of Brazilian musician Tim Bernardes, while ‘Jara’ references the courage of the Chilean folk singer and national hero Victor Jara killed by the Pinochet regime. “And when you see the first sign of violence, you bear it all as hard” - its baroque pop mandolin riffs are complemented by a crafted choir of her own vocals by American singer Meara O’Reilly. The controlled cacophony of ‘Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman’ brings the album to a climax, concluding with the meditative title track, ‘Shore.’ With the band working on nine more songs for ‘Shore part 2’, due to come out in the Spring of 2021, it will be intriguing to hear where else the shore leads.

Track Listing:-

1 Wading In Waist-High Water
2 Sunblind
3 Can I Believe You
4 Jara
5 Featherweight
6 A Long Way Past The Past
7 For A Week Or Two
8 Maestranza
9 Young Man's Game
10 I'm Not My Season
11 Quiet Air / Gioia
12 Going-to-the-Sun Road
13 Thymia
14 Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman
15 Shore