Fleet Foxes - "Fleet Foxes" (2008) One the best albums of this century

Near the start of their career, with just a six-song EP of demos to their name, Fleet Foxes issued an almost apologetic note to listeners who had sought them out. It was written from the viewpoint of a record buyer with just enough money to buy two or three CDs, a willingness to experiment, and a slightly jaded feeling about “New Rock Music”.

While it’s true that Fleet Foxes’ self-titled debut (the working title was Ragged Wood) had hazy wafts of Haight-Ashbury or some mystical Californian canyon, its blend of pained poetry and delicious harmonies sounded entirely fresh on its release in June 2008.

From the opening chant of “red squirrel in the morning” on “Sun It Rises” through the accidental Christmas carol of “White Winter Hymnal” to the winsome verses of “Oliver James”, Robin Pecknold’s band established a dislocated sense of time and place that sounded both ancient and modern. Chanting about squirrels is not a conventional way to open a rock album. Reimagining the story of the baby Moses, calling him Oliver, and relocating him to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, is a startling way to close one. Pecknold often uses words as colour, and his book of lyrics does much to deflate pretension, but the line in “Oliver James” about “the sound of ancient voices ringing soft upon your ear” stands out as a shorthand description of Fleet Foxes’ approach.

Timelessness doesn’t just happen. The band’s classicism incorporates an interest in English folk, stretching into Scandinavia, accessed through the sombre vocal traditions of Sacred Harp singing.

Pecknold’s subsequent explanations of the songs implies that they were experiments, or puzzles to be solved. Sometimes, his descriptions elude the finished song. The sombre odyssey of “Quiet Houses” is characterized with the question: “Can we blend Motown, barbershop, and Nintendo music?” The barbershop is just about audible, Nintendo not so much, Motown hardly at all.

But throwing an anthropological fire blanket over the music misses the point. Fleet Foxes’ songs are exercises in emotional disorientation. The geography is imprecise, time and place are dissolved. Ragged Wood is just about right, and the song of the title is a joyous romp through a romantic glade. If this music has a religious impulse, it is the one handed down to Pecknold by his musician father, who imparted the history of the Beach Boys as if it was a divine creed. For Pecknold, Brian Wilson was a guiding light, and the whole character of Fleet Foxes can be located in their approach to vocal harmony. It’s not about clinical perfection, as much as the beautiful tension of voices pulling in different directions.

It’s a pilgrimage in which an American band asked directions from English folk, got lost, and found themselves lighting campfires in an undiscovered land.