Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues

(Bella Union)

‘So now I am older / than my mother and father when they had their daughter / now what does that say about me?’ is the first line of this second album from everyone’s favourite Seattle-based indie-folkers, and it sets the scene perfectly for the tear-sodden blend of nostalgia, regret and optimistic wonder which permeates this rewarding record. Like Phil Spector recording in a shack on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, Robin Pecknold and co swathe their songs once more in a dense fog of reverberating drums and guitars, making way on occasion for the incisive jangle of the title track, an almost medieval folk instrumental in ‘The Cascades’ and the sparse, latterday Byrdsian pastoral of ‘The Shrine/An Argument’.

Fleet Foxes play the Corn Exchange, Edinburgh, Wed 29 Jun.