This record, by all rights, should be an utter disaster. It's been hyped beyond all hope of redemption, the band themselves have only a couple of EPs to their name, they describe their music as "baroque harmonic pop jams", they look like scruffy 70s folk-rock rejects, and they describe themselves on their MySpace page as "Fffffllle eeeee et t Fffff oxxxes". Imagine my surprise upon actually listening to this album to find that it was not only listenable, but even quite brilliant in places. I came for the hype, but I stayed for the music.

The music of Fleet Foxes is at first glance fairly standard folk rock, with perhaps an emphasis on elegant construction and vocal harmonies over minimal compositions played on a beat-up old acoustic guitar. But when you look closer it becomes apparent that these are no ordinary songs, and that they've been constructed with a meticulous attention to detail sadly lacking in many other bands of this type.

Take Tiger Mountain Peasant Song for instance. For the most part, the song is just a fingerpicked acoustic guitar and some very stark yet melodic vocals from frontman Robin Pecknold, yet every element is used to maximum effect to produce a song that sounds clean and unrushed, yet never sparse or bare. White Winter Hymnal on the other hand borrows heavily from Simon and Garfunkel with its vocal melody immediately bringing 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' to mind, but the recycling never feels tacky.

Fleet Foxes prove to be equally adept when it comes to working with a broader palette, too. Blue Ridge Mountains has a nice earthy, Appalachian tone to it that's given body and form by the inclusion of some gentle piano work and unobtrusive percussion. It's probably the most fully formed realisation of what the band is trying to do here, but it's by no means the only good track, in fact, pretty much everything here is well done, and the album is paced superbly, with its (roughly) forty minutes being neither too short nor too long.

Great songwriting, a definite sense of having a defined goal and working towards it, and some pretty impressive production that enhances rather than drowning out the simple yet gorgeous sounds of the band, have created that rarest of things, a self-titled debut album that is actually pretty damn good. I'm sure that there's some room for improvement here, but I'm damned if I can tell where it is. Fleet Foxes have come up with a truly stunning album on their first try, and I can't wait to hear what they come up with next.