Until 2017, the world wasn’t hearing too much from Fleet Foxes. Last night in Ybor City, Florida — at the band’s spring tour kickoff and Tampa debut — fans inside the sold-out room were lucky to hear whatever they could as chatty concertgoers coalesced around The Ritz’s bar area (more on the talking later).

Fleet Foxes arrived out of Seattle in 2008 with a self-titled debut that promised to revive folk music thanks to a larger than life sound driven by lush arrangements, lyrics that read like poetry and frontman Robin Pecknold’s simple, pure and powerful vocal. Fleet Foxes fulfilled that vow three years later with Helplessness Blues, a bonafide indie-pop classic that travelled way back into folk music’s history before returning as a 50-minute masterpiece bursting with updated hymnals, weird instruments and and an even more complex aesthetic all articulated with Pecknold-penned observations on how age-old human wants and desires get complicated by the trappings of life in the 21st century. In many ways, Fleet Foxes was peerless. The band went on tour behind the effort, which enjoyed praise from elitists and casual fans while earning a 2012 Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album.

And then nothing.

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Pecknold checked out of music, put the band on hold and started to check items off of a list of things he wanted to do. He travelled, lived in a monastery and moved to New York City so he could get an undergraduate degree at Columbia. He learned how to surf at Empire State breaks like Rockaways, Montauk and Fire Island. Pecknold even did a solo hike to base camp at Mount Everest, still quietly trying to write songs as Fleet Foxes’ hiatus grew longer and more normal to fans on the outside looking in.

In 2016, during a break from school, he and guitarist Skyler Skjelset finally holed up in a Washington state church-turned-studio and demo-ed songs that would eventually become Crack-Up, Fleet Foxes’ 2017 comeback album.

Chaotic and cathartic, Crack-Up literally picked up where Helplessness Blues left off while implementing a more experimental approach to arrangement where songs would start and stop. On first listen, the disjointed stanzas and movements made for an uneasy listen, but repeated spins allowed Pecknold’s thoughtfulness and his bandmates’ gifts for composition to shine.

During the winter, Fleet Foxes brought Crack-Up to Norway, Australia, New Zealand and Asia. The band’s sprawling spring tour includes stops at Coachella and Atlanta’s Shaky Knees, but on Thursday, Fleet Foxes — which in the past has sold-out venues likes L.A.’s Greek Theater and the Sydney Opera House — kicked this leg off with a sold-out show at The Ritz in Ybor City, Florida. The first of four Sunshine State shows was was well worth the wait.

Over the course of 20 songs, Pecknold — flanked by Skjelset plus multi-instrumentalists Morgan Henderson, Casey Wescott and Christian Wargo — revisited old material and beautifully brought Crack-Up to life during a shimmery, nearly-two-hour set. Solo takes on “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” and “Oliver James” — each a decade old — undressed Pecknold’s sterling vocal, and Morgan stayed busy switching seamlessly between his arsenal of instruments which included flute, zills, tambourine, and baritone. Wescott flashed the mandolin a few times and let it shine on a spin through Helplessness Blues highlight “Grown Ocean” where each passing minute found the Foxes’ harmonies growing warmer with every verse before they all finally culminated in the song’s bare-bones acapella outro.

“White Winter Hymnal” and “Ragged Wood” — both from the band’s 2008 debut — featured the bellow of long, bowed passes on the stand-up bass plus crashing cymbals to get the blood flowing. The crowd even sang along in the latter stages of “Wood” and kept it up for the lovelorn chorus of “Your Protector.” Many closer to the stage, in fact, were happy to sing along on many occasions (“Mykonos,” “Blue Ridge Mountains”). Pecknold was happy to keep stage banter at a bare minimum, opting instead to let the ebb and flow of the generous setlist do the talking.

Unfortunately, that was not the case in other parts of the crowd.

Chatter all but ruined a strong, upbeat set from opener Natalie Prass (the Richmond, Virginia and her band of undercover disco hitmakers endured quite nicely), and several Fleet Foxes songs (including a lively run through sanguine Crack-Up cut “Third of May / Ōdaigahara”) featured the obtuse, muffled conversations happening at the Ritz watering stops. Rock clubs are certainly not sterile environments where the pin-drop silence of a theater is expected, and there is nothing better than sharing a concert experience with friends, but it’s a bit confusing to show up to a sold-out show and have to grimace every time a group of irritated fans has to literally shush loquacious, loose-lipped patrons who thought they bought a ticket for the tailgate.

Blame it on life in the algorithm age — where passive listening does quite often lead to the discovery of new and exciting bands like Fleet Foxes — but holding full-on conversations while a band works through the songs it painstakingly pieced together for an audience’s listening pleasure is disrespectful.

Pecknold and the band didn’t seem to notice, however, and it’s always great to see a full venue with a crowd happy to drink hard on a weeknight. Maybe those irked by the disappointing behavior of concert goers still on training wheels can take a page from the Fleet Foxes cannon where a song like set-closer “Crack-Up” invites listeners to live in life’s moments, especially the hard ones filled with lingering pain, questions and confusion (Pecknold has said that the song was inspired by post-election head-scratching).

“As an iris contracts, facing the day. I can tell you've cracked like a china plate,” is how one lyric in the song goes. The idea seems to be borrowed from a F. Scott Fitzgerald essay called “The Crack-Up,” where the great American author uses imperfect dinnerware to talk about how certain slightly-broken things seem to only get utilized for mundane tasks like late night crackers or the leftovers from a meal.

There was a brief moment during that doomed take on “Third of May” — with Fleet Foxes locked into all of its polyrhythmic, multi-instrumental glory — where the crowd chatter almost blended into the song like some of the backing tracks Wescott deployed at different points in the evening. It almost, kinda, made sense, and added an extra layer of humanity to a song Pecknold wrote for his longtime friend and bandmate Skjelset. In retrospect, the moment was a reminder that, sometimes, even imperfect and maddening moments can add color to the minutiae of everyday life (or a Thursday night concert).

To close the encore, Fleet Foxes roared through “Helplessness Blues,” a song where Pecknold laments the farce of individuality before flipping the idea into an anthem built around the argument that we’re all breathing the same air, just a bunch of tiny little blips in the mosaic otherwise known as space and time. Pecknold extols the virtue of working hard at the the things we think we’re good at so that we may have a chance to contribute to something greater.

“A functioning cog in some great machinery,” is how he puts it, “serving something beyond me.”

All that talking at The Ritz on Thursday night was definitely a little beyond comprehension. Thankfully, the music Pecknold and Fleet Foxes played spoke louder. And we’re lucky that it was there to remind us of the things that really matter anyway.

See a setlist and have a look at more photos from the show below. Listen to songs from the setlist here.

Setlist (Fleet Foxes — The Ritz, Ybor City)

I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar

Cassius, –

Grown Ocean

White Winter Hymnal

Ragged Wood

Your Protector

The Cascades (Instrumental)*

Mearcstapa

On Another Ocean (January / June)

Fool’s Errand

Blue Ridge Mountains

Tiger Mountain Peasant Song (solo)

Mykonos

Battery Kinzie

Third of May

The Shrine / An Argument

Crack-Up

—

Oliver James (solo)

Drops In The River

Helplessness Blues