From Hell To Breakfast: Musical Review With Recipe: Fleet Foxes and Butter-Garlic Shrimp

Sitting in traffic, that great time-waster of the twentieth century, has shockingly not been solved in the twenty-first.  You get hungry, bored, and angry at the idiocy of people texting whenever the traffic by some miracle starts to move.

The upside is WWOZ, the best radio station on the planet, and WTUL, the only real alternative music in New Orleans.

Traffic: where I got hungrier and hungrier listening to Dr. Dog, Franz Ferdinand, and what the hell was THAT?

THAT was Fleet Foxes.

I'd like to say "It sounds like..." but of course good alternative music works very hard not to sound like anybody else.  

Imagine that Calexico slipped Burl Ives the tongue.  Or that Kansas got naked and went skinny dipping with Iron & Wine.  Or that the eerie melodies of Appalachian / Celtic folk music got stoned and went restlessly looking for the 1980's with Liberace, the Washington State Lumberjack Men's Glee Club, and the Beatles.

Okay, that's not helpful.  I admit that.Fleet Foxes. From Seattle, Much?

No, wait.  Try this on:

The heart of Fleet Foxes is a seemingly infinite supply of melodic hooks that wrap around outstanding songs.  The lyrics are generally very committed to a convergence of dark folk-song imagery ("in the quivering forest with a shivering darkness...and the river got frozen...") that sets up a base of operations for some pretty edgy insights into the human heart.   They dig the cosmos.  They work inward from there towards feeling.

Good strategy.

Instrumentation grows outward from classical and acoustic guitar hooks.  But the Foxes are spare, not snobbish.  They rely on interesting vocal harmonies and good songishness rather than inserting a didgeridoo played through a wah-wah pedal, as some more pretentious musical auteurs might.

Which makes them refreshingly honest: they challenge themselves to raise singing and song-making to a higher art than it sometimes achieves, and they succeed.

I can't listen to too much of them at a time: I wouldn't buy whole albums of Fleet Foxes, because I start to get musical diabetes, but in small doses, it's worth your sample-cash to put some Foxes in your rotation.

Hint: line up "Blue Ridge Mountains," "Mykonos," and "White Winter Hymnal" together.

By the time they're done playing you'll be out of traffic. 

But you'll still be hungry.

Take two pounds of shrimp that have not been soaked in British Petroleum pollutants and shell them.

Melt some butter in a frying pan: hell, I don't know how much... how much do you want?  

Add some chopped garlic (ditto).

Cook it until the garlic is nicely sautéed.   Sqeeze a couple of lemon quarters in OR add some chopped red pepper: do not attempt both unless you're in a very, very strange culinary mood.  Now add the shrimp.  Stir it up.  A little Tony Chacheres Creole Seasoning to taste.  If you do not have this essential spice in your kitchen, kill yourself.  Life isn't worth living.Garlic Shrimp (Red Pepper Variation): Simplicity Itself and Rather Quick

When the shrimp is pink, add a splash of dry white wine, and stir the lot together.   If the sauce seems thin, I sometimes add a little sprinkle of cornstarch to thicken it, but not very much or it gets lumpy and doughy.  In the last minute I tuck in a couple of tablespoons of chopped green onion, but I'm told by the Nibs Who Know that this is a mistake.  I don't care, I like it.

Serve over pasta with a chardonnay or slightly-too-cold pinot grigio and Spinach Madeline.