Fleet Foxes

Sun Giant EP

(Sub Pop; 2008)

By Clayton Purdom | 19 March 2008

This yawning chasm, this Ansel Adams pictoscape that stretches sun-drenched like the balding skull of God lay yet unmarked by the Glow and though it does stir us and dons the great Jacket of My Morning I find it empty and with little to write about do stoke the flames of Blood Meridian for a longish opening sentence. If this EP were a videogame it would be Shadow of the Colossus without the Colossi to cast shadows or be bosses to fight and if it were a movie it would be Sergio Leone’s without the close-ups or the guns blasting and striking exclamation points of smoke. If it were a smoothie it would contain only one fruit, and that fruit would be apple juice, which I don’t really mean as an insult because apple juice is my favorite juice but apple juice isn’t a smoothie! it’s just a juice. Smoothies should contain several types of fresh fruit of contrasting seed-age and flavor profile and be swirled through with a scoop of chilly ice and about a pint of an interesting juice like papaya or guava or white grapefruit and then be blended for like thirty seconds and topped with whipped cream. They can’t just be juice.

Similarly, remote control cars should always have batteries not just in the car but in the remote control, because even if the car is powered it needs a remote control to tell it how to use that power. If batteries of the appropriate size are placed in both units the car is remotely controllable and the user can enjoy the dervish-like speed and rascally cornering that accompanies a good remote control car but sadly if even a single battery is missing or even fitted incorrectly the user may appear to look like an oaf feebly pushing levers. Not that I much mind frivolity or purposeless pressing of buttons. I will pick through the bones of any record upon my desk and pontificate wildly like a televangelist. Clearly much of this is circumlocution but to review such a piffle though pretty and quite nice is not an activity it is an exercise in abject futility as absurd as Sisyphus and his infernal boulder. One must imagine Sisyphus putting on Grizzly Bear instead. I do believe that music is great and Fleet Foxes’ music occasionally reminds me of the greatness of some music and I believe that music is like a vast glassy lake into which the listener must gaze and often that listener finds his or her own reflection distorted perhaps but made new and so truer but in the case of this EP all I see is the crystal azure sky above and we all know that the sky is stupid.

And so if farting is just pooping a cloud and music is what happens when speakers poop tiny earthquakes then Sun Giant doesn’t poop. And by this I don’t mean that it is constipated and deep within its bowels there grows a backed-up train of poo ready to be vomited toiletward but that it simply doesn’t poop, has never pooped and doesn’t understand the process fundamentally and why other people must constantly retire to the bathroom to make such wretched stench. It has never looked or thought about it but if it checked it would find no hole between its legs waiting to release such excretion, merely skin as smooth as the small of its back. Which is just as well, really, and it would probably be nice to never have to go potty, but for my own part I could never be friends with someone who has never squeezed out a big wet shit.