Fleet Foxes Love To Disappoint (Live @ the Somerville Theater, 10.6.08)

Monday October 6^th, 7:00pm:

I walked into Somerville Theater wanting the Fleet Foxes show to be bad. There were various reasons, most notably the cold Monday October night I had just walked out of. Frank Fairfield opened the show with a short set that, while having potential for country-folk goodness, lost its way to me on its path to the far right corner of the upper right balcony. Also lost to me was my right contact lens, which sucked back into my skull for several minutes in the middle of his second song, leaving me cursing my bad vision and now painfully bloodshot eye, and this warbling man whose songs I would probably quite enjoy were I able to truly hear them. I listened later on his myspace page, and was mildly entertained. However, based on the way he sounded at the time, I fully expected Fleet Foxes to suck.

They did not. After distracting the audience with tune-ups and chord strums, the Fleet Foxes broke out into an almost ethereal four part a capella harmony to start their set. I judge the quality of music based solely on the feelings it elicits in me, and can honestly say that the start of this show was one of the best spine-tingly goosebumbings I had gotten in a long while. I was sold! When they began playing instruments, I was equally impressed by their clean sound and professional stage presence. Their professionalism broke down a bit in between songs as Robin Pecknold power gulped his way through bottles of Poland Springs, which he jokingly claimed was “straight moonshine” later in the show. It didn’t matter though, because the band as a whole was endearingly funny and genuine, responding to the audience with almost annoyingly witty comebacks and playing off each other as they tuned up or changed instruments.

The set was excellently played, and were it recorded sans audience retorts, could probably replace the studio album without anyone really noticing. Even in the “worst seats in the house”, their sound was amazing and full, and may have put this show up into one of my top five based on sound quality alone. That being said, I was also a little bored at points throughout the set. Don’t get me wrong, their songs are beautiful, and their voices cherubic, but on more then one occasion I wondered whether they were actually playing or if they had just inserted their album in the CD player and pressed “random. Maybe I’m not used to hearing live music sound anything like the recording, or maybe I just wanted a three guitar shred fest a la Skynyrd’s Free Bird. Either way, I walked out of the show happy with the $25 ticket stub in my pocket.

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