It’s hard to label Fleet Foxes’ sound, which makes listening to them all the more enjoyable. At times they resemble a cross between The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and early Neil Young, but doses of Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Richard Thompson, and, due to lead singer-songwriter Robin Pecknold’s pop bent, even Simon & Garfunkel are thrown in for good measure.

Certainly, a vague Celtic tinge shades many of their melodies, but these guys are as American as any band now making a dent on iTunes. Their harmonies, which are consistently stunning, sound like they’re floating down from the mountaintop, and the acoustic bent to their arrangements evokes log cabins and wood-burning stoves without sounding like an affectation.

Ultimately, I have to opt for The Band as the real forerunner to Fleet Foxes, but in feel rather than sound. Both groups reveal an earthy range of influences that have somehow generated roots of their own; the songs are oddly recognizable yet unique, and the spirit of an earlier, haunted republic permeates both bands’ worldview. Fleet Foxes rock from deep within such outdated concepts as family and community, rather than through an agent and an auto-tuner, and they’re not the least bit ashamed of it. They’re old-fashioned, but only in the sense that they truly seem to believe.

                                                ***

There’s not a dud track on “Fleet Foxes.” Even the ones that aren’t quite as interesting lyrically are built around vaguely baroque arrangements full of swirling organs and pounding drums that suggest Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” landscape of pampered Lords and Ladies mixed with the darker elements of the American frontier. If this is genre music, it’s a genre that, to lift a phrase from Vonnegut, has come “unstuck in time.” You feel like it’s simply lighted here temporarily during a journey through the mists.

Fleet Foxes’ big hit in England, “White Winter Hymnal,” is a haunting little madrigal that, not surprisingly, most American kids have zipped right past during prepackaged grease-runs to McDonald’s. Like so many other songs on the album, “White Winter Hymnal” is built around a timpani figure and a mix of electric and acoustic guitars, but the vocals are the real story. All the band members work on Fleet Foxes’ arrangements, and they’re also credited, R.E.M.-style, as co-writers. There’s a warm, organic beauty to the finished product that, you have to figure, could only arise from the interaction of a group of close friends.

"White Winter Hymnal"

I was following the pack
all swallowed in their coats
with scarves of red tied ‘round their throats
to keep their little heads
from falling in the snow
And I turned ‘round and there you go
And, Michael, you would fall
and turn the white snow red as strawberries
in summertime…

We’ve obviously entered the world of a childhood memory here, but the tune’s lack of specifics imbues it with a dreamlike quality that stands up to repeatedly listening. It’s a prayer to the past, with a little blood thrown in just to keep it honest. The only way this would be a hit in the United States is if Lady Gaga sang it buck naked on the final episode of “American Idol.”

Another pivotal track on the record, “He Doesn’t Know Why,” may well be my favorite. A prodigal son tale told from the perspective of an astonished brother, it rises on a soaring melody that, with its minor chord statements, implies the exhilaration of the open road with the sadness of leaving behind the people who love you. There’s a strong suggestion that the person the narrator sings about is now damaged goods, but he’ll undoubtedly be hitting the road again once he deigns to let his still-loving family reground him. Again, there’s something unspoken here that gives the song an unnerving edge.

"He Doesn't Know Why"

Penniless and tired, with your hair grown long
I was looking at you there and your face looked wrong
Memory is a fickle siren song
I didn't understand

In the gentle light as the morning nears
You don't say a single word of your last two years
Well you will when you've reached the frontier
I didn't understand, no

See your rugged hands and a silver knife
Twenty dollars in your hand that you hold so tight
All the evidence of your vacant life
My brother you were born

And you will try to do what you did before
Pull the wool over your eyes
For a week or more
Let your family take you back to your original mind

There's nothing I can do
There's nothing I can do
There's nothing I can say
There's nothing I can say
I can say

Those are Ringo drum fills, by the way, that sort of slap-happy, counter-intuitive thing that leaves you slightly hanging in its appealing eccentricity. Between that and the consistent use of timpani, Fleet Foxes may be the first Beatles-influenced band to give Mr. Starkey a place in the driver’s seat.

                                                ***