Bedouin Dress

This opens with acoustic guitars arranged in interlocking patterns that feel both ancient and carefully constructed, each voice in the arrangement identifiable but woven into something larger than any individual strand. Robin Pecknold's lead vocal carries a classical quality — clear, unforced, capable of great expressiveness without theatrical flourish — but what Fleet Foxes do that's genuinely distinctive is surround that voice with harmonies that feel genuinely communal rather than merely arranged, as if several people are singing together because they actually want to rather than because someone wrote the parts. The song's emotional world is pre-industrial in its orientation, concerned with cloth and craft and the handmade, with the kind of patience and beauty that requires time and attention to produce. There's a melancholy running beneath the surface that has nothing to do with personal heartbreak and everything to do with something more cosmic — the awareness of impermanence, the weight of how things end and are forgotten. It belongs to the Pacific Northwest folk revival of the late 2000s, when a certain generation of musicians became obsessed with communal living and older American and European traditions, filtering them through contemporary indie production sensibility. You'd reach for this on a Sunday morning in an old house, when the light is particular and you feel the rare, fragile sense of being exactly where you're supposed to be.