No matter how many dashes and parentheses Robin Pecknold inserts into his song titles, or how many Japanese mountains and medieval British monsters loom behind his lyrics, a Fleet Foxes record will pretty much always sound like Fleet Foxes. The opening minutes of Crack-Up, the band’s third album and first in six years, are instructive in this regard. First, we hear the queasy shifting pitches of...
“Every decision that we made for this album, every sound we choose, every word we chose, it was so deliberated—for every word we chose, I thought of three other options and why it shouldn’t be those words,” Lorde told Rookie’s Tavi Gevinson recently. If you doubt her—and you might when she rhymes, “I know about what you did and I want to scream the truth / She thinks you love the beach,...
“Everything went back into the basement... We were the few people doing this in 2008. Really bad, wussy emo rock 10 years after it was relevant.” In 2013, this is how former The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die guitarist and Broken World Media founder D. Nicole Shanholtzer described the earliest days of what would be known as the “emo revival.” A more accurate...
