There's a ride at Cedar Point called snake river falls that takes you and 12 of your closest friends up a big hill in a sort of boat-raft thing, with the express purpose of turning you right back around and dumping you down an equally large hill with water flowing down it. At the bottom, your raft then slams head first into a small pondish body of water spraying mass quantities of water in many directions, drenching you and anything in about a 50-foot radius. After you ride, you can then go stand on a bridge under which these rafts pass after their giant splash. You can hold onto a railing and face the rafts as they come down the hill, and much of the mass quantity of water previously alluded to comes charging directly at you. You can stand and watch as the water forms into directed projectiles coming at you. Your body tenses in anticipation of the force that's about to overtake you. You clench your teeth and squint your eyes and contort your face into a grimace as this wall of water prepares to do its worst. Then, for just a second, you're completely at the mercy of the water – its immense power rushing over you, leaving no part of you uninfluenced by your interaction with it (that is to say, dry). And then as quickly as it started, the water's all back in the pond. You're left smiling, dripping wet, and slightly dazed at what just took place.
This is pretty much the exact experience I have around the 0:43 and 1:49 marks of “The Shrine/An Argument” – My body tenses and I actually make that teeth-clenched-eyes-hard-shut face as Robin Pecknold's vocals ramp up “Sunlight over me”, and then suddenly as he sings “No matter what I do” I am completely overtaken by the power and passion with which he sings for just an instant; then I am left somewhat disoriented, tingling slightly, and in a bit of a haze after having been completely overtaken by the pure force of the song for a moment, before it lets me back to normal and moves on.
Helplessness Blues is an album full of well put-together songs, incredible harmonies and arrangements, evocative lyrics, and moments—like the aforementioned—that simply blow me away. Without a single weak track, the album ranges from the beautiful and simple “Blue Spotted Tail” to songs like the complex and grandiose title track, complete with incredible layering and a drastic time and tempo change. The songs are all obviously crafted, and not simply thrown together for the sake of a song—diverse instrumentation arranged just right for all of the different moods of the album; dynamic changes to really convey emotion (that's right modern music, all of your songs don't have to be uniformly the same volume!); a range of tempos and time signatures throughout. An incredible amount of thought and care was clearly put into making a beautiful product.
One thing that really makes this album stand out is something that it has which I feel that most music today lacks: the element of surprise. Most of the songs that I hear do exactly what I expect them to. There's a verse with a predictable chord progression followed by a chorus with a similarly predictable progression; maybe another verse and a chorus, and then maybe they repeat the first verse with a key change because they didn't write enough lyrics to get the song to exactly that “generic radio single length”. The whole thing is one volume and one tempo. With this album, I was kept guessing the whole time, as they surprised me again and again with their songs twisting and turning and taking me on an incredible ride. They would go for chords that I simply wasn't expecting (4:08 of “The Shrine/An Argument”). They would lure me into thinking that a song was in 3/4 (beginning of “Bedouin Dress”) and then suddenly when the drums came in it was in 4/4. They would make harmonies more intricate each time they repeated a verse (“Someone You'd Admire”). They would just change the time and tempo of songs (“Helplessness Blues”, “The Shrine..”). Unexpected triplets and peculiar rhythms (“Battery Kinzie”...what can I say, I'm a huge sucker for triplets!), bold instrumental solos (violin on “Bedouin Dress”, and how 'bout that dissonant sax at the end of “The Shrine...”), the list goes on.
In short, the album is a masterpiece. At this point I'm probably into double digits as to how many times I've listened through it, and it's not letting up. The intricacies of the music make it just as (if not more) interesting each time I listen, and the powerful feel of the arrangements and soul of the vocals just keep me coming back for more. If, when January 2012 rolls around, I'm not unhesitatingly proclaiming this as the best album of the year, I will be eating my words while listening non-stop to whatever album comes out that I find better. But frankly, I don't see that happening.
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