In the six years since Fleet Foxes’ last album, their former drummer has eclipsed them in the public eye by embracing a flamboyant persona fluent in sex, drugs, self-awareness, and sarcasm, like a not-so-subtle referendum on his previous gig. None of Josh Tillman’s jokes have been crueler than the unmistakable alliteration embedded in the title of the first Father John Misty album: Fear Fun. Considering the lengths folkies like Tillman, Justin Vernon, and Marcus Mumford have gone to ensure their beards no longer speak on their behalf, it’s all the more amazing that Robin Pecknold hasn’t tried to counteract the earnest, unglamorous perception of him and Fleet Foxes. He has actually embraced it.
While Fleet Foxes’ music has grown increasingly more complex and less crowd-pleasing, Pecknold’s personal trajectory has strangely aged in reverse—the old-soul serenity of Fleet Foxes gave way to the post-grad anxieties of Helplessness Blues, and now we have Crack-Up, which does not present recent Columbia enrollee Robin Pecknold in the most flattering light. But there’s a textured humanity in place of the assumed and implacable scare-quotes authenticity that served as Fleet Foxes’ personality prior. Crack-Up contains his most compelling writing to date because it’s so damn relatable in 2017—reacting and retreating inwards as people and institutions fail to meet the standards set in one’s head.
Columbia University has been an unexpectedly major influencer of indie aesthetics in the past decade due to its inextricable association with Vampire Weekend, whose self-titled debut serves as the most convincing collegiate promotional material ever constructed. Through the lens of Vampire Weekend, Columbia came off like a finishing school for the attractive, socially curious, and culturally omnivorous—laying out the unlimited possibilities and blindingly bright futures of an Ivy League education and New York City at the same time. Pecknold signed up for the exact opposite experience, “I Am a Rock” to Ezra Koenig’s Graceland, “sitting outside Dodge Hall, smoking, being mad,” and presumably glowering at the kids milling about with their polo shirts, pop songs, and crushes.
In an uncharacteristically low and atonal register, Pecknold mutters, “I’m all that I need and I’ll be till I’m through,” on Crack-Up’s opening suite. Even more so than Helplessness Blues, Crack-Up obliterates the superficially genial and harmless image so easily projected onto Fleet Foxes. At times, Pecknold threatens to be the most misanthropic, nontraditional student to wander an Ivy League quad since a bearded Rivers Cuomo hobbled through Harvard. Though Pecknold’s mood is startlingly desultory throughout most of the album, his view turns outward from the library stacks, adopting a dim outlook on the military police state (“Cassius, - ”), the trajectory of the nation (“Crack-Up,” “If You Need To, Keep Time on Me”), and his fellow man (“- Naiads, Cassadies”). On “Helplessness Blues,” Pecknold resigned to not being a special snowflake—a line that has gone from being precious to uncomfortably prescient—and Crack-Up likewise takes a condemnatory tone towards men who think they’re special enough to upset the designs of Mother Nature (“Fire can’t doubt its heat/Water can’t doubt its power/You’re not a gift… You’re not a flower”).
Helplessness Blues remains one of the decade’s most resonant expressions of millennial tension, years before “millennial” became an oppressive buzzword. But Pecknold’s anxieties were contrasted by music that signified the exact opposite of what it felt like to be financially insecure and technologically dominated in 2011. Likewise, Crack-Up supports the heft of Pecknold’s concerns by working on a massive scale that no band is really attempting in 2017, let alone able to accomplish. Fleet Foxes are still a folk act, though one that’s absorbed far-flung versions of the term. By the penultimate “I Should See Memphis,” it’s more than likely that Pecknold is referring to the one in Egypt rather than Tennessee, as Fleet Foxes integrate Gnawa music, chamber orchestration, pastoral psychedelia, and jazz modalities without ever exceeding their reach. On “Cassius, -” alone, they toggle between krautrock synthesizers, Middle Eastern string melodies, and Appalachian stomp-and-clap rhythms without making it obvious how this was a heretofore unfathomable triangulation.
And while there are enough Civil War and ancient Roman namedrops to rival The Monitor, these aren’t barriers set up by Pecknold, but entry points on an album that proudly flaunts its sonic and thematic solidarity. Though Crack-Up lacks a set-piece single like “White Winter Hymnal” or “Battery Kinzie,” I dare anyone to speak in non-illusory terms as to what those songs are actually about. The unfailing beauty and depth of Crack-Up ensure it’s always welcoming. Fleet Foxes have always been dense—“we have four people singing and five people playing instruments, and Skye [Skjelset] playing a bass pedal while he plays the guitar. That’s 10 things happening all at once,” Pecknold noted back in 2008. Nearly a decade later, Fleet Foxes have learned how to leverage that force into their album that can actually knock you on your ass. The explosive dynamic shifts of “I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar” and “Third of May / Odaigahara” lend the album’s longer suites a seismic force of a latter-day Swans record.
Put aside the inclination to strip it for singles, and Crack-Up’s generosity can feel bottomless. Rather than a show of contempt for the confines and craft of a three-minute pop song, Crack-Up is one of trust, applying its harmonic and textural gifts with the same free-flowing intuition as Joanna Newsom’s Ys or Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House. As with those—or any of the albums Pecknold and Dave Longstreth praised in a predictably misinterpreted Instagram conversation about indie rock’s “progressive” heyday—Crack-Up is music that requires an immense amount of skill and patience to make, and it can be off-putting particularly at a time when newer artists have simultaneously embraced chart pop and a return to the sonic and social values of the ’90s. As with Dirty Projectors’ “Keep Your Name,” Fleet Foxes sample their earlier selves on Crack-Up—“I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar” features a snippet of a high school a cappella group covering “White Winter Hymnal,” a move that could hit a sour note, a dismissal of one of Fleet Foxes’ best and most-beloved songs by saying, “Hey, a high schooler could play this.”
This is the easiest explanation, but it doesn’t feel like the correct one; given the subject matter of ““I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar,” this meta exercise becomes one of Crack-Up’s most legible and devastating emotional moments, demonstrating the chasmic difference between the wide-eyed optimism of a decade prior and Pecknold’s political and personal disillusion. This becomes more apparent on the album’s second half, particularly “Fool’s Errand” and the closing title track. Not only are they the most conventionally pleasant songs here, but they hint at Pecknold recognizing the futility of self-reliance and learning to once again embrace friendship and Fleet Foxes.
It’s incredibly tempting to compare Crack-Up and Pure Comedy, and almost unavoidable—both records are long and lack the pure pop moments of each artist’s past. They are almost excessively pretty in their orchestration, and follow a general narrative arc from total cynicism to the realization that each other is all we’ve really got. But Pure Comedy makes the game feel rigged to Tillman’s delight, a lecture where we’re all reliant on the professor for the answer key. Fittingly, Crack-Up takes the more rewarding perspective of the overwhelmed, but exhilarated student of the world—unsure about their place in the big picture, about the answers to life’s grand mysteries, but damn sure of their willingness to figure it out.
