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Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues is out this week from Sub-Pop, and it’s not a moment too soon if you ask us. “Grown Ocean,” the last song on that album, is so nice a piece of folk pop music, it’s made the three years since Ragged Wood suddenly seem very long. The band has progressed while still maintaining a distinctive sound—reverb drenched harmonies, distant percussion, a wall-of-sound kind of production that makes their predominantly acoustic songs sound refreshingly imposing. As self-assured as their debut was, they sound even more confident now, with a Disney soundtrack-like orchestra surging up behind them, with singer and guitarist Robin Pecknold singing lyrics that are actually in iambic pentameter (!), words every bit as affecting without instrumentation: “In that dream I’m as old as the mountains/Still as starlight reflected in fountains.”  

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