The evolution of the urban bushwhacker

Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver have no trouble attracting new followers. Their music is as ordered and pretty as AC's is unhinged, though it's also polarizing and intense. Both hail from regions where country and city meet and meld. Seattle, home to Fleet Foxes, is well known as a place where outdoorsiness and nerdy cosmopolitanism collide. Eau Claire, Wis., where Justin Vernon began Bon Iver as a solo project (he's now formed a band), is a small town, but it's also home to several colleges.

If Animal Collective's musicians are bushwhackers who bury their tracks, Fleet Foxes, a quintet led by 22-year-old Robin Pecknold, are the kind who carefully carve trail markers. The band is still riding the ripples caused by its self-titled summertime debut -- the influential webzine Pitchfork recently named it the album of the year and the band played Jan. 17 on "Saturday Night Live."

Like their fellow Seattleites who've perfected latte art, Pecknold and his friends are artisans. "There's no digital effects on the record, there's no synths," Pecknold told an interviewer on the jambase.com website last July. "All of our amps and guitars are old. We didn't really care how it ended up sounding, production-wise. We just wanted it to sound good, but not too tricky. Not too much we couldn't pull off live. Less than half the record was recorded to tape at studios, but most of it was done at my house with Pro Tools, like, not really caring what it sounded like at all."

The hitch is the mention of Pro Tools. The band's focus on harmonies that are reproducible in concert evoke the second golden age of white-guy harmonizing -- not the doo-wop era but the end of the counterculture, when longhairs like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young made singalongs into anthems. Yet, as recorded by producer Phil Ek using up-to-date studio tools, the Fleet Foxes' sound doesn't merely mimic the period it so strongly recalls.

As realized through Pecknold's serious, deliberately archaic songs, it takes on timelessness as a subject. Reimagining the folk-pop of the late 1960s, a subculture that used contemporary pop tricks to conjure dreamed-up versions of earlier styles like Appalachian folk balladry and medieval madrigals, Fleet Foxes ends up in a space between or beyond epochs -- a very cyber-age thing to do.

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Soulful sound of isolation