Healthy Living Books Music

Rating: - Top Drawer
What planet does SunRa live on. This band are absolutely brilliant. OK so they have taken CSN&Y, Neil Young as reference points but then again nearly every contemporary band have taken yesteryear's bands as references for their music because popular music has never been bettered since then for sheer quality or output. Applause for tight harmonies, subtle chord changes and beautiful melodies. Also bearing in mind this is their first album, EP excepted, which is also brilliant, and it is a blistering outcome. Undoubtedly one of the finest folk-rock albums of recent years.

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Rating: - Beautiful
One of those magical albums that doesn't immediately impress, needs a little bit of your time to have a few listens before the true beauty is unleashed and then you can't stop listening to it for days and weeks on end... and then in a few years, you will glance upon it again, dust it down and remember all over again. Buy it...

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Rating: - Gorgeous
Ok, so maybe this album is not that original (insert comments about Beach Boys/ CSN influence/parody here) BUT- there is nothing new under the sun after all, and Fleet Foxes' debut still beats the 60s soul/ 70s punk/new wave and 80s electro rip-offs currently populating the charts, in my opinion. Gorgeous harmonies, twinkly piano and acoustic guitar drenched in reverb all add up to a folky, melodic masterpiece that is already one of my albums of 2008. This is the sound of a hippie choir singing their hairy hearts out in the middle of some lush green wood. Who cares if some of the songs sound samey- Fleet Foxes do what they do so well, I don't WANT them to make any huge musical detours. One of the things I love about this album is that it feels like it could be from any era; it's timeless and will surely last past the journalistic hype of the here-and-now. Wonderful!

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Rating: - Dissapointing really
So,I wondered,what is all the hype and buzz about this album,so had to give it a go.
Basically it's the Beach Boys sing Crosby,Stills and Nash.It's pleasant,ok in the car for half an hour,but other than that it's rather tame and lifeless,bit dull if I am totally honest. Another over hyped band doing nothing very new,File under not bad but not of any great merit.

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Rating: - Desperately Overrated
I love my 'freak folk', my Newsoms, my Oldhams et al. I love close multi-part harmonies, and I love Sub-Pop records. Even so, I had my misgivings about picking this album up, having heard a couple of tracks which, while they sounded ok, did not exactly have me raving. However, I found a cheap vinyl copy and duly bought it.

Next time I'll listen to my gut. What is so surprising about this album is just how remarkably dull and lifeless it is. The frothing reviewers, virtually in raptures describing the 'incredible' and 'otherworldly' harmonies, have clearly never heard a Zombies, CSNY or Beach Boys record before, because there is literally nothing here that you haven't heard before and in a more lively and characterful form on a record by one of the aformentioned bands. I was hoping that Fleet Foxes would incorporate the harmonies into something both unique and new, but most of this album is really working at the level of pastiche or nostalgia, always an uninspiring approach for a debut. On top of that (and something of a clincher for me) the production is awful, as flat as a pancake with no texture in the harmonies, which are often buried under shonky sounding reverb. Cheesy instrumentation and, to be honest, uninteresting lyric writing of the 'hello birds, hello sky' variety leave this one in the dust. You want a properly weird, folk/country tinged, freak-folk oddity? Buy Mayo Thompson's 'Corky's Debt To His Father'. It has barely left my turntable for 6 months, and I have never heard anything like it, a soubriquet I sadly cannot apply to Fleet Foxes. Damn Shame.