Fleet Foxes hit the road, with a quick stop in Seattle

The world is catching up to the Fleet Foxes.

The sweetly harmonizing Seattle five-piece, the biggest buzz band of 2008, visits its hometown Sunday for a show at the Moore, then continues on its career-building, sold-out world tour with dates in the U.K., Europe and Australia.

The rise of the Foxes has served notice to the music world that Seattle is more than Pearl Jam and Nirvana. While the grunge movement showed the gritty, hard-rock tradition of the Northwest — remember all those articles about how we stay indoors because of the weather, which is why we have so many garage bands? — the Fleet Foxes, by contrast, show our outdoorsy side.

Seattle is closer to nature than almost any other big city in the world — you can be in the wilderness in 45 minutes. And we're surrounded by mountains and water. The folk-influenced songs of Foxes' frontman Robin Pecknold capture that aesthetic.

Listening to the charming, round-robin vocals of "White Winter Hymnal," on Fleet Foxes' debut Sub Pop album, you're transported to a snowy scene of bundled-up folks with scarves around their necks. Like much of Fleet Foxes' music, it has a churchlike feeling. The recording sounds as if it was made in a cathedral, rather than Pecknold's bedroom in his parents' house.

Some of the songs on the album, and on a previous Sub Pop EP, "Sun Giant," chug along to a pop beat, but most are slow and folk-influenced, with three- and four-part harmonies. Some of the most moving are the simplest, like Pecknold's solo, the Brit-folklike "Oliver James," on which he accompanies himself on guitar.

If it were just the harmonies, and the soft contrast to hard rock and hip-hop, that the Foxes represent, the band wouldn't be such a worldwide phenomenon. Pecknold's spare, atmospheric lyrics also set the band apart. He knows how to create a mood, how to take you into his natural world.

The wonderful harmonies have resulted in inevitable comparisons to Crosby, Stills & Nash and the Beach Boys, and the folk influence has led to a somewhat degrading "neo-hippie" designation. But while those influences are there, they don't quite prepare you for the Fleet Foxes sound, which is really something new. It's a reaction to grunge and to our troubled world, a quiet appreciation of the natural life all around us, which can be soothing and sustaining.

Like grunge, the Fleet Foxes' sound may be appreciated by music fans around the world, but it will never be fully understood by them. Only those who live here realize that grunge's hard-driving, wild sound is in the long tradition of Northwest rock, going back 50 years to the Sonics, the Wailers and the Kingsmen, and that the nature that surrounds us has always informed our artists (mostly painters and sculptors). Now, it's informing our popular music scene like never before. And the music world is the better for it.

Opening the show is Frank Fairfield, an old-timey singer-songwriter who plays fiddle and banjo.

Patrick MacDonald: 206-464-2312

or pmacdonald@seattletimes.com