Fleet Foxes
Shore

Trying to refine the sound of this "Shore" under the pouring rain in these moments is unfeasible. Moreover, water is not quite the molecule it is said to be. Dull days then, you know, scattered with "rompicazzismo". Fortunately, to be saved quickly, in this 2020, there is the return of Robin Pecknold with the bustling folk-rock of his refined indie creature. Yes, the first, sudden impression is that his compositional class takes him well above the contemporary and surrounding landscape. The enchantment runs back to the beginnings but without bucolic landscapes and fairy tale rhymes; if distant, then, from the intricate prog-folk solutions of "Crack-Up", it nonetheless matures its thematic consequences in tangible songs of experience. Clear vocal harmonies, complex but not heavy arrangements, as if gracefully directing the free boiling of the sea.

But water is not the main element, the homeomeria of the album. At least, not more than air. Of the wind bending over the crystalline waves. "Shore", the fourth album of the Seattle folk band (which to say seems almost an oxymoron), has an airy lightness and an invisible strength; it pushes like the wind on the tide but also bends the ears. It is the wind that breaks the hourglass. It hones a shining song -among suspended winds and different voices- , although in the background emerges the theme of death, accompanied by an unavoidable sense of defeat and numerous other, incipient existential discomforts. But with the blessed desire to breathe fresh air again. Embracing, to be with others, the fidelity to oneself, in a Hamletian-adolescent choice. The album, wonderfully evocative the cover photo ("Outlet, Bering Glacier, Alaska 1973") by Hiroshi Hamaya, channels then along bright paths traced on the sand, on the waves, on the earth, on the slopes by the autumn wind. Loving the wind, ceaselessly. Loving its wrath and its expectations. Facing adverse fates, the sharpest pitfalls of a life often miserable, rereading everything through melodies in major tones and serpentine and lyrical harmonies. As if to ask us, in a song with sealing force, why so much suffering is generated by people who break your balls for free. And anyway "you" go on. Even in the "we", sometimes screwed, sometimes not.

"In these last days / The cheaters have set my fate”. ("Maestranza");

"Oh, devil pass, oh, devil pass (I never want to die, I never want to die) / Feeling a golden hand opening on me (the time is wrong, wrong time, wrong time, wrong time)". ("Quiet Air/Joy");

"I could dress like Arthur Lee / Scuff my shoes the right way / Maybe read the Ulysses / But it's child's play / I could brood every night / Find something unique to say / I could pass for a scholar / But it's a young man's game". ("Young Man’s Game");

"Now you go to Victor on his ladder to the sky / And I stayed singing it with you on my portion of the shore / And you sang for the lost who were young and deserved more / And now I stand all night waiting for you to come in the door". ("Jara”);

"Oh friend, was it better then? / We were alone, we were proud of our pain". ("A Long Way Past The Past")

"I will swim for a week in the warm American waters with dear friends / I will swim to rise high to the meadows of Eden" ("Sunblind”).

But the air is clean / And I got it all wrong / But I made peace / ... / I have been bright, I have been faded / I am almost halfway / ... / Hardly believe we made it in something. / ... / But in the end they are the same thing / The drought and the rain for me” ("Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman", *song that contains a sample of Brian Wilson counting time!).