Fleet Foxes in Poznań

This was the concert I had been looking forward to with unusual trepidation. Fleet Foxes are in top form and have just released their second album Helplessness Blues, a more-than-worthy follow-up on their breakthrough debut. They are young, fresh and offer sonic refuge with their rural, back-to-the-land style. Sensing it might be a gold mine, I spent half a day today poring through Robin Pecknold's lyrics and discovered quite a few germs - alluringly poetic visions of love, death or change. In Poznań, they were squeezed between a Polish indie band Poise Rite (a definition of average for me) and the headliner Portishead.

Robin and the company gave a long, intense and uneven concert.Their set list could not have started better, but Grown Ocean, my personal favorite from the last album, caught me off guard coming as the opener. Regardless, I quickly picked myself up. I'm not ashamed to admit that they left me close to tears with this song. Then came a phase when I had a feeling they did little more than replay their CDs live (something I remember screwing up my Interpol or Editors concerts). Add to that recurring problems with sound quality, minor but irritating, and you have got a recipe for disappointment.

But then the Seattle-based beardy boys came back, tweaking well-established songs, combining them into three- or four-piece sets and letting Robin do more acoustic work. These were high points in the gig, in my opinion. No amount of applause was enough to tease them out for seconds.

I appreciated their professionalism, though. They pretty much covered, and quite convincingly, key songs from their both albums, including one or two tracks I simply could not recall. They were on time, very well-behaved and working hard to please the crowd.

Funnily, with his apprehensive demeanor, Pecknold sort of confirmed allegations I'd read about him being a rather heavy case of social anxiety. Except saying hello and thanking the crowd every now and then, he could hardly muster composure to put together two or three complete sentences. The drummer was much more talkative and even cracked a joke about Poles inventing karaoke (the night before he went out in the city and did some pub singing and silent disco).

I waited a bit to see Portishead play a record or two but despite quite interesting visual art accompanying their concert I just gave up. Trip-hop is definitely not my kind of thing.