Fluxblog
June 27th, 2017 2:18am

Slack In The Lines


Fleet Foxes “Mearcstapa”

At some point between Fleet Foxes’ second and third albums, the emphasis of Robin Pecknold’s music shifted from the human voice to the guitar. His voice is still there, ringing out with a lot of echo, but it’s moved from the center of his arrangements to the periphery, like he’s some spectral presence lost in the empty spaces and skeletal structures of the music.

I like the way Pecknold’s music on Crack-Up emphasizes the tactile nature of the instruments. The guitars, bass, cellos, and violins carry melodies and form structures in the music, but they also sound like – well, metal strings. This is both literal and abstract. “Mearcstapa” opens with overlapping guitar parts that sound like wires swaying on a light breeze, evoking in my mind the image of some broken piece of infrastructure in the middle of nowhere. A jazzier guitar part that comes midway through the song is considerably more graceful and conventionally beautiful, but that passage is relatively brief.

You end up back in the same desolate space before drifting out on an ambiguous melody played in rounds by a string section. The composition comes together to feel like some kind of journey, but there’s a strange absence of strong emotion. It reminds me of clinical depression, of feeling like you just can’t access your own feelings and so you just get increasingly numb. That string outro gets under my skin because as much as it announces that something significant has definitely happened, the feeling of it registers as either “now what?” or “so what?”

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