“Fleet Foxes Are Not Hippies,” ran the recent headline of a feature in a Seattle arts paper, just above a smaller headline that read: “Don’t Let the Floppy Hats, Jesus Beards and Five-Part Vocal Harmonies About Rivers, Trees and Sunshine Throw You.”

With a start like that, you half expected what followed to turn into something from The Onion. Instead, the group’s de facto leader, Robin Pecknold, explained that the “hippy” accoutrements of dabblers such as Chris Robinson, of the Black Crowes, were symptomatic of an acquisitiveness that couldn’t be further removed from what hippies initially stood for.

You can see why it might be a tricky area. The five members of Fleet Foxes must have heard some music made in their lifetimes, but you wouldn’t know it from hearing this debut. Fleet Foxes is proof that the US alt-folk well has yet to run dry. And, indeed, much of what follows an introductory liturgy called Red Squirrel/Sun Rises sounds like a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young improvising to keep their spirits up while waiting to be rescued from a well.

So much music meant to evoke what Greil Marcus, in Invisible Republic, referred to as “old, weird America” does so simply by keeping it spare and pushing up the reverb knob so that the results can’t help but sound ethereal. There’s an element of that approach with Fleet Foxes. At the same time – in particular on the rapt, wordless dawn chorus of Heard Them Stirring – it highlights the breadth of their harmonic span. Miraculously for a 21-year-old, Pecknold appears to have perfected the art of writing songs that appear not so much written as retrieved from your own subconscious. Van Morrison achieved a similar thing on his 1974 masterpiece Veedon Fleece, tapping into what he has called a shared “folk memory”.

On Tiger Mountain Peasant Song, Pecknold delves into imagery that could have come straight from that album: “Wanderers this morning came by, Where did they go, Graceful in the morning light, To banner fair.” Your Protector is no less cinematic in its span, a last will and testament mapped out around the album’s biggest hook. On the folk ballad Oliver James, gentle picking gives way to Pecknold detailing its subject’s demise: “Washed in the rain, no longer.”

Sounding like a desolate Neil Young over a choir of David Crosbys, Pecknold delivers the album’s most sustained shiver on Meadowlarks. “Little children laughing at the boys and girls,” he sings as though broadcasting from a fever dream, “The meadowlarks singing to you each and every day.” And far from being lost in translation, the beauty he writes about seems magnified when Fleet Foxes set about recreating it in notes and chords.

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