Fleet Foxes - Drops In The River

What is it about the Pacific Northwest that inspires such sad, other-worldly music? Fleet Floxes drink deep from the same well of plaintive, echo-chamber Americana as fellow Seattle residents Band Of Horses. Both bands evince a gnarled, lived-in, plaid-shirt kind of sound that is bracingly redolent of the Great Outdoors.

Indeed, singer/guitarist Robin Pecknold – evidently a thoughtful chap - has a neat theory that music itself is, in evolutionary-biology terms, a substitute for the sense of wonder human beings once felt for the unspoilt natural world.

Very much a retreat from the trappings of modernity, songs such as Drops In The River conjure a sense of bucolic solitude, all acoustic curlicues and thumping tom-toms, like Henry David Thoreau’s classic back-to-nature novel Walden re-imagined by Crosby, Stills & Nash. It’s a vivid, immersive world that will no doubt work best over a whole album. You’ll have to wait until June for that, although the band release a debut EP, Sun Giant, in May.

Listen to Drops In The River on [Myspace]. Meanwhile, here’s their (mildly off-key) cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams.