FLEET FOXES Crack Up (Nonesuch/Warner) Someone please keep this album away from Malcolm Roberts, erstwhile Senate intellectual who thinks sending boys to school is a waste because they’ll gain more by “doing” than any of that there fancy book learnin’. No doubt Senator Roberts, like most of us, was a fan of the first two Fleet Foxes albums where they mingled beatific harmonies to echo Crosby, Stills and Nash, electric folk instrumentation to remember Fairport Convention, and

Daniel Boud FLEET FOXES Vivid Live, Opera House, May 26 Here’s a superficial response to the first Fleet Foxes gig in Sydney in five years, and their first anywhere outside a few warm up gigs in out of the way bars recently, in nearly as long: Robin Pecknold’s time studying music theory seems to have borne fruit. Here’s a slightly less superficial response: judging by the raft of new songs we heard they don’t do the pretty quite as much, or the dreamy quite as often as they

In 2011, as their second album, Helplessness Blues, defied convention and actually sold CDs by the tens of thousands, as well as concert tickets, Fleet Foxes were the generation-defining band for folk/pop, for independent music, for long-haired men with sensitive souls. They had those stacked beatific harmonies and an elegiac pastoral tone, were filling rooms such as the Sydney Opera House with ecstatic fervour, and already inspiring bands such as Boy & Bear. They, in particu