If you're still sitting on the fence about Fleet Foxes, here's all you need to know about the Seattle troupe's third album, Crack-Up. It opens not with one song, or two, but with three - a proggy, multi-suite effort called I Am All That I Need/Arroyo Seco/Thumbprint.
It's a song that moves from a grumpy mumble to a triumphant celebration with soaring strings and whispered falsettos while veering through almost every mood imaginable - and then back again. At times it sounds like two completely different songs fighting to be heard over each other.
But, running at nearly seven minutes, it's not even the longest track on Fleet Foxes' 11-track third record. That honour is bestowed on Third of May/Odaigahara, Crack-Up's centrepiece that runs for more than eight minutes and cycles through just as many moodswings but - crucially - never once outstays its welcome.
Written entirely by front man Robin Pecknold, Crack-Up is the six-years-in-the-making follow-up to 2011's Helplessness Blues, a genre-defying album delivered at indie-folk's peak that paved the way for, well, banjo-loving stadium folksters like Mumford and Sons. Ugh.
