Appreciation Post: White Antelope
*MP3: Fleet Foxes - “Mykonos”
*MP3: Fleet Foxes - “White Winter Hymnal”
Fleet Foxes came along with other folk outfits like Bon Iver last year and helped freshen and expand that well-trodden American genre with new trimmings and into new territories.
But where Bon Iver took the more experimental, unclassifiable route, Fleet Foxes held to the genre’s core, maintaining a certain stillness, simplicity, and yes, harmony. Where many bands fidgeted with clicks and delicate crossfades, Fleet Foxes sounded like they had just exited a 14th-century Franciscan monastery run by Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
Lead singer Robin Pecknold’s one-man White Antelope is a continuation of that idea and might be considered no more than a dalliance, but the songs are worth a listen. Streaming only on Pecknold’s Myspace page, White Antelope is mostly a collection of covers of old American and Irish folk tunes most likely recorded in or around the Fleet Foxes recording days.
The multi-tracked vocal “Wild Mountain Thyme,” a modern Irish-Scottish folk tune, sounds like Crosby, Stills, and Nash. “False Knight on the Road” is an interpretation of “Fause Knight Upon the Road,” a selection from a collection of old Scottish and English ditties known as the Child Ballads. A highlight is “Silver Dagger,” a song taken straight from the American folk tradition about a girl who can never marry because of her knife-wielding mother’s bitterness toward men. Even St. Bob gets a multi-tracked makeover on a cover of “It Ain’t Me Babe,” which is now gone from the website but might be found elsewhere.
Many of the songs have been recorded before, but they work here mainly because of Pecknold’s method of recording, with simple acoustic finger pickings underlying his soaring, echo chamber vocals. These songs swell with emotion, and Pecknold’s powerful wail pushes them right into the familiar sweet spot that all good American folk music should occupy. Fleet Foxes or White Antelope—it doesn’t matter. This is good old-fashioned music, a ghost galloping across the plain in the modern world of song.
(Eric Martz)
Posted 1 year ago
