Review: Fleet Foxes; The Crack-Up

Long before Mumford and Sons gave bearded banjo bashing a bad name, Fleet Foxes were the self-conscious pin-ups of the new folk scene. However, the acclaim that followed their 2008 debut LP was too much for retiring frontman Robin Pecknold, then all of 22-years old. With follow-up Helplessness Blues cleaving to the cliche of the difficult second album and drummer Josh Tillman leaving to reinvent himself as Father John Misty, the sensitive troubadour plunged into despair and depression.

So he did what any young man in his position would. Trimmed his beard, ditched his lumber-jack shirt and enrolled at Columbia University, where he could be just another earnest post-graduate student with a moochy deportment. On the evidence of the group’s long awaited third LP, it was a worthwhile hiatus, with Peckneold’s songwriting arguably at his sharpest since Fleet Foxes’s first appeared.