From Pitchfork Music Festival 2018: Fleet Foxes Dazzle Fans With Old Favorites

Indie folk band Fleet Foxes gave their fans the chance to experience the sensation of thousands of their comrades singing the songs they’d otherwise likely never gotten to sing with anyone else that during their headlining set on Saturday, July 21 at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. The band packed their setlist with top tracks off albums released at the height of their career. It was clear that they didn’t want to deviate from what their followers know and love.

Though The Westerlies, a brass quartet, joined Fleet Foxes onstage for their set, their performance faithfully replicated what you hear on the band’s studio releases. Swells that normally rely on guitars and cymbal crashes felt a little grander, but the brass flourishes often got buried under jangle cacophonies. Amplified stage sound also prevented frontman Robin Pecknold from sounding like he was singing into an empty marble room, which is the effect of the crisp, echo-heavy sound mixing characteristic of Fleet Foxes’ albums. Other than these small differences, the performance did not deviate from those recordings. As he played, Pecknold appeared tightly wound, as if he were intently focused on executing the songs flawlessly.

The band opened to a relatively quiet crowd with songs mainly from their most recent album, “Crack-Up.” The audience’s energy didn’t pick up until the sixth song, when they busted out fan favorites like “White Winter Hymnal,” which glimmered with fairy tale magic. That’s when the iPhones came out. The thousands of festival-goers entered into collective catharsis spurred by their shared love for the music, and sang along with the familiar-sounding and universally singable (or at least hummable) melody. The enthusiasm continued on the band’s subsequent performance of another smash hit, “Ragged Wood,” which was released with “White Winter Hymnal” on their debut self-titled LP in 2008. The band’s other two biggest hits— “Blue Ridge Mountains,” known for its haunting and addictive piano riff, and “Mykonos,” whose catchiness alone is probably why it’s so famous—were strategically placed equidistant from the middle of the set during the second half of the performance. It felt weirdly cynical to evenly distribute excitement across the set (minus the opening “warm up” phase) by building it at calculated apexes—but, hey, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to please an audience.

Fleet Foxes’ career has had a weird trajectory. They exploded onto the indie rock scene 10 years ago with two releases in one year: the “Sun Giant” EP, followed by the full-length “Fleet Foxes,” both of which were stacked with wildly popular songs. Three years later, they came out with “Helplessness Blues,” which had a few well-known songs, but was nowhere near as successful as its predecessor. Fleet Foxes then disappeared for six years, until they came out with “Crack-Up.” By last year, however, they lost the reputation they had the decade prior.

Bands don’t exist for the purpose of being popular, but there’s something a bit unfortunate about Fleet Foxes’ relationship with fame. Their fanbase loves them, but the majority doesn’t seem loyal enough to recognize more than a few songs—maybe that’s just the nature of listening to music these days, or a result of all the songs sounding the same. This became clear when the band set itself up for the obligatory encore, walking offstage three minutes before the set’s official end. After a short period of scattered cheers and hesitant standing, Pecknold sauntered back out and played a song that wasn’t quite popular enough, and therefore garnered nominal enthusiasm—let’s hope the delight built by the last string of hits compensated for this weak ending.

—Staff writer Danielle Eisenman can be reached at danielle.eisenman@thecrimson.com