I’ve heard the Name Game play out in many contexts, but at a concert—between the drummer and some guy standing ten rows into the audience—was a new one. “Do you know Rebecca Callahan*?” shouted a tall kid in a white Polo. “She was, like, two grades ahead…”

“Rebecca, oh, yeah,” replied Fleet Foxes drummer J. Tillman.

This, one supposes, is the fate of stage banter at a show when the drummer admits he grew up in a nearby suburb (Rockville) and is pressed upon to kill time between every song while the lead singer re-tunes his 12-string guitar and the rest of the band hangs out in unhelpful silence. But that was the sort of casual vibe Fleet Foxes brought to the 9:30 Club on Wednesday, breaking down the distance between the band and the sold-out audience in such a way that it felt less like a crowded concert hall than the living room of a buddy who makes you pay $9 for a Guinness. Other topics of band-audience banter included the menu at Rockville pastry shop The Fractured Prune, frontman Robin Pecknold’s bad haircut (hidden beneath a red knit hat, which he refused to remove), and whether Tillman more closely resembled Jesus Christ, Charles Manson, or Rob Zombie.

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Fleet Foxes, they of the empyreal harmonies, are in high demand these days. The band’s self-titled debut LP, released a year ago, quickly earned a spot on the contemporary folk syllabus. Frontman Robin Pecknold, a social recluse whose lyrical incantations seem to echo along the slopes of some far-off mountain range, has managed to hook into a sound that Brian Wilson might have discovered if Brian Wilson were a hermitic goatherd. Actually, Pecknold comes from the wealthy Seattle suburb of Kirkland–but he’s spent plenty of time in the mountains, and used to be way into Lord of the Rings. His songs bear a sort of mythical seal, dealing with wanderers and wildernesses and grounded by an extraordinary reverence for kinship.

Lucky us: The capital has been selected as one of the 10 cities in North America Fleet Foxes will hit on their summer tour, Sub Pop announced yesterday. They’ll be playing at the 9:30 Club on Wednesday, July 29. Tickets for the show go on pre-sale at 10 a.m. tomorrow. In advance of the tour, the label today released the song “Mykonos,” off the band’s 2008 EP Sun Giant, as a single. It is a gorgeous song, all long shadows and ghostly harmonies singing of solitude and struggle. Pecknold’s brother Sean, whom the song is rumored to have been written for, directed the exceptionally groovy music video.

FLEET FOXES NORTH AMERICAN TOUR DATES, SUMMER 2009:

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