Fleet Foxes

Crack-Up

Fleet Foxes triumphantly emerge from hiatus with their most progressive effort yet.

You might call it challenging, but Fleet Foxes were never likely to settle for anchoring comeback gestures of easy reassurance: rather, Crack-Up re-asserts their exalted tug on the heart by testing it at ever-greater distances from known shores.

These 11 tracks are immersive, shifting creations, retaining the heavenly signature harmonies of FF’s previous work, while further expanding the band’s sound.

Throughout this intensely poetic, introspective album, currents of guilt, regret and resolution battle in quiet turbulence, the group’s trademark harmonies and acoustic folk settings augmented with additional sonic strata.

Distinctive, involving, challenging, accessible, progressive and most other things that continue to be desirable in an indie-rock record, whatever the year.

Apply a bit of patience ... and this challenging, expectation-defying, flawed but ultimately rewarding record is likely to prove worth the effort.

What this album actually is, is the Fleet Foxes we already know but on a much, much bigger scale – and that’s all it needs to be.

Despite the record's nebulous nature, there are are still a few great individual tracks that stand up on their own.

Crack-Up is an important step for Pecknold if he is going to continue making music, but it may not end up being one of the most accessible albums in the Fleet Foxes oeuvre.

Crack-Up is a solid return after a long time off for Fleet Foxes, even if some of its loudest moments are overthought and confused. But those moments, though distracting, don’t totally blot out the finest songs here.

By otherwise masterfully navigating between dark and light, quiet and loud, sparse and lush, Crack-Up takes contrasting musical ideas and textures and makes them functional, if not transcendent. Ultimately, though, the album fails to shed much light on the mind of an artist more preoccupied with shrouding his songs in crashing waves, shadow, and smoke.

This is – as many expected it would be – hugely accomplished in its composition, and while it’s not short of irritating periods of pretension, it’s par for the course when beauty, indulgence and complexity are key ingredients in the melting pot.

If Crack-Up falls short of perfection, it inspires hope that transcendence is waiting around the corner.

It’s a bizarre sensation: listening to something that’s clearly had a lot of time, love and attention poured into it, something obviously impressive in scale and ambition, made by artists admirably trying to push their sound forward – and it leaving you completely unmoved.

Crack-Up is an altogether more ponderous record, with lyrics musing on life and a musical blueprint that diverges from what came before.

The majority of the record is uniformly vanilla, too overwhelmed by lush strings and pastoral pleasantness to deliver a decent hook. It’s stunning in its orchestration, yet it fails to leave much of a mark beyond that overall prettiness.