Music without borders

The baroque pop bridge-building
of Seattle’s Fleet Foxes

HENHOUSE ROCK: Fleet Foxes

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“It’s a lot of fun to be in a band,” says Fleet Foxes guitarist Skye Skjelset. No shit, you may be saying to yourself, but this is not something I hear from interview subjects often, or ever, at least not in such straightforward terms. “There are very few people in this world that I would ever imagine doing what I’m doing with, but these guys are my best friends.”

When the members of Fleet Foxes were kids, they picked up guitars and played along to their parents’ record collections, largely classic rock, country rock and folk. “I’d always been into music,” says Skjelset, “but until you start playing instruments, that world is kind of unknown to you. I was always intrigued by how it was done. It was like a mystery.”

Skjelset met Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold in junior high and the pair began playing music together almost instantly. By the end of high school, they were booking their first shows with a drummer, using such monikers as the Pineapples. But it was only when they brought Josh Tillman, Casey Wescott and Christian Wargo aboard, and adopted the name Fleet Foxes, that the band’s baroque pop began to gel.

On the Sun Giant EP and self-titled LP (both on Sub Pop), their soulful, harmonic music unfolds in a style that references rock, Americana and the traditional music of other countries ranging from Ireland to Japan. The latter influence is rooted in Pecknold and Skjelset’s high school years, when they studied the language in school and played loads of Final Fantasy on their own time, in part because they were so fond of the soundtrack. Skjelset sees more similarities than differences between the old-time sounds of the States and those of other countries.

“Traditional music is traditional music,” he says. “Of course there are elements of each style that are specific to where it’s coming from, but the ideas, the inspiration and a lot of the sounds are often pretty much the same.”

Stylistically, Fleet Foxes clearly have deep roots but, having grown up on rock, they’re hardly roots revivalists, or “easy listening,” as Seattle’s The Stranger recently referred to them. “[Our music] doesn’t have power chords or tons of distortion or synthesizers,” says Skjelset, “but when I hear ‘easy listening,’ I think of that weird, creepy grocery-store music.”

With Valleys and Receivers at
Divan Orange on tuesday,
July 15, 9 p.m., $12