The Fleet Foxes played at the Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna. Our reviewer Scott Kara reports
KEY POINTS:
Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes should get home to Seattle and have a good shower. The frontman's hippy hair was matted and natty - near to dreaded - and he didn't look like he'd washed since the start of the beardy band's very long and successful year which came to a triumphant end at this show.
It was a year when their self-titled debut made most top album lists, including topping TimeOut's top 30, and arguably made them the band of 2008.
Pecknold might have looked a fright and Jesus-like at times, especially with a solitary spotlight on him during his stunning solo acoustic version of Tiger Mountain Peasant Song, but his folks back in hometown Seattle needn't worry.
He hasn't been living the rock'n'roll lifestyle too hard. Him and his band were in fine voice. These lads can sing, with Beach Boys harmonies tickling the hairs on the back of your neck during songs like White Winter Hymnal and Ragged Wood.
They morphed together beautifully. Pecknold's solo interludes included a rousing Oliver James early on and for Katie Cruel, which Pecknold described wryly as a song based on a 16th century Scottish poem - "so it's very exciting and relevant". He stepped away from his mic and sang it straight. I'll say it again, the lad can sing.
They were relaxed with the between song banter - like drummer J. Tillman apologising to any one in the crowd who may have seen him being a "half-dressed Charles Manson" on the beach earlier in the day - yet not so loose and freaky with their music.
That they didn't expand and grow their songs was the only thing missing from a perfect night. Songs like Your Protector, the band's most menacing moment, and Ragged Wood, are ripe for a freak out. The version they played of Your Protector was heavy and powerful - with the Dylan-meets-Sabbath mantra of "You run with the devil" a special highlight - but it could have been at least five minutes longer.
Maybe they're tired? But more than liklely it's to do with the fact they're quite new to this and still figuring out how to freak their songs out. And their short yet perfectly formed one hour set, plus encore, also hints that they know they have a back catalogue to build up.
Perhaps we'll get the 15-minute psychedelic version of Your Protector, or the eight minute meandering yarn of Blue Ridge Mountains when they come back next time and folk-rock the house at Vector Arena like those other shaggy wonders, the Kings Of Leon.
But aside from the Fleet Foxes needing to fly their freak flag higher, it was apt that the show was at the Bruce Mason Centre because if these beautifully autumnal songs aren't about the end of the golden weather, then I don't know what is.
