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Thursday, 4 April 2024

Helplessness Blues

 


Like the world and his wife I got caught up in the hype in 2008 and bought the Fleet Foxes eponymous debut album.

I subsequently got a copy of the follow up 2011's Helplessness Blues on Sub Pop/Bella Union from the library. I burnt it, played it a couple of times, and then filed it away on the Folk/Singer-Songwriter shelves where it has subsequently gathered dust for a good few years

The other day I converted the burn to a download to save space and thought that I should give it a listen. I must confess to not recognising any of the tunes and none particularly jumped out.

I am maybe in a minority in  being pretty underwhelmed as it was lauded by the vast majority of the critics and has a very impressive score of 85/100 on the Metacritic Aggregator and featured in pretty much every list of the top 50 albums of the year.

I've no regrets about demoting it to a digital only format.

Fleet Foxes - Lorelai

Fleet Foxes - Blue Spotted Tail

It's better than Knocked Down Loaded!

5 comments:

  1. Save space on your hard drive and delete this load of old bobbins

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  2. Never understood the love, but I’m trying to be better about leaving people alone when it comes to their personal tastes. Still struggling though. I need Rol to write a piece on the subject of music snobbery. - Brian

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    Replies
    1. Just been reading a chapter of Michel Faber's book Listen which is all about music snobbery, Brian. I'd recommend reading that over anything I can cobble together!

      As for Fleet Foxes... yeah, the first album and Mykonos... after that, I struggle.

      Delete
  3. Ditto others here. FF had a great debut album and I have both follow ups (yrs here and Crack Up) which I can't recall ever having played. I liked both these tracks though so I ought to go back and have another listen. Re musical snobbery I can go back to the time of Freddie and the Dreamers time and I still resent how they lost out to those Beatles upstarts who, let's face it, just got lucky

    ReplyDelete