At the Vogue, on Friday, April 29

Every garbanzo bean in the city was there when Fleet Foxes last played Vancouver in 2008. Four hundred Budgies Burritos employees stuffed into one place, all of them in the throes of religious ecstasy, making for one hairy-ass crowd. I recall taking in the slightly culty vibe and thinking, “You cold-blooded flakes won’t stick around for the second album.”

Based on this first night of a sold-out double-header from the Seattle-based super-hippies, boy was I wrong. The hirsute throng was still out in force, only bigger, even after a whole three years to jump off the magic bus. They were joined this time by a new and healthy cross section of groomed West Enders and other tribes, including even a small contingent of sharp-looking VSE-type assholes and their traditional partners in business and life: sluts. It appears that Fleet Foxes has hit the mainstream.

When the band finally appeared on stage (after a beefy opening set from the Cave Singers), all five members simply stood there in a line for what must have been 10 minutes, like a freak-folk Beatles facing an audience that was losing its shit before we’d heard a single note. This was one of the frequently lengthy pauses an occasionally tentative Fleet Foxes took for its first concert since re-emerging with its new (and getting more amazing with each listen) album Helplessness Blues.

Under less-infatuated circumstances, the band might have lost momentum with all the instrument wrangling and swapping that went on. Like the long, tense pause that ensued, after a shimmering “Drops In the River”, when band co-founder Skyler Skjelset struggled to tune what frontman Robin Pecknold called “an Italian prototype 15 million dollar guitar.”

“Tell us about that guitar, Skyler,” goaded Pecknold. “I pulled it out of a stone,” the guitarist shot back. Hey, even their jokes sound like they were written by Pentangle.

As it was, possibly because monsoon season actually ended for a day in Vancouver, a sense of giddiness pervaded the night, from audience and band alike. Once the pulse-quickening instrumental section of “Sim Sala Bim” dovetailed into a spine-tingling “Mykonos”, with “Your Protector”, “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song”, and “White Winter Hymnal” floating finally into “Ragged Wood”, Fleet Foxes was unmistakably hitting its stride. And it was a glorious, monumental sound.

When bassist Christian Wargo, keyboardist Casey Wescott, and drummer Joshua Tillman all seemed to bring a little extra gusto to their already cathedral-like harmonies during a soaring “Montezuma”, it became beautifully evident that the band was feeling the magic as much as we were.

In the end it was a genuinely transporting night, to the point where it’s no wonder people are so devout about this band. As things wrapped up with “Helplessness Blues”, you were left feeling that with all of its heroically earthy, back-to-the-garden and staring-at-the-sea type stuff—think CSN spliced with Yes and then transmogrified by an off-the-grid British folk purist—Fleet Foxes was offering the only rational alternative to the babbling, lobotomizing techno-nightmare waiting outside. At least that was probably the thrust of a lot of the tweets going out during the show.