Fleet Foxes at the Columbia City Theater ::: Photo by Josh Lovseth

As if we needed more reasons to be incessantly on Twitter, they now include the possibility that you be notified about a super small warm-up set by basically the biggest band in town at an intimate venue before they go out on tour in support of a not yet released, highly anticipated record. Then again, I doubt such a reason crops up more than once for any given user in the vast ocean that is Twitter.

Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues isn’t out yet, but it is out there, and as far as I’m concerned Robin Pecknold & Co. have crafted their best work yet, a confident but delicate group of songs that threaten to entirely remake the next generation’s expectations of Sub Pop. Though this secret night at Columbia City Theater was the culmination of the band spending a couple days working out new songs, equpment and a gigantic front of house console, it was also their first night back as a complete band on a stage in over a year. And with a new member to boot: Morgan Henderson, he of the Blood Brothers and more currently Past Lives, is now a Fleet Fox multi-instrumentalist.

The lucky few were treated to about an equal helping of old and new over the course of 19 songs, the band in a perpetual state of shuffling guitars and pensive concentration. Easing into what Pecknold warned might be a longer than usual night, new songs were front-loaded and old songs were not the same as we heard last time around. “Mykonos” remains a splendid paen to nature, but like “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song,” sounded more even lush than I remembered, if that’s even possible. Where the debut full length took a while to grow on me, the verdant compositions of “Grown Ocean,” “Bedouin Dress,” and “Battery Kinzie” immediately became my jams at first listen, and for me also came out as the defining moments of the night. That and Henderson’s wacky sax bass clarinet on “The Shrine / The Argument.”

Catching what might be Sub Pop’s flagship group play a to a crowd of 200-odd folks, on the eve of what promises to be their biggest release yet, while preparing for a tour where they’ll be normally playing to rooms ten-times that size and larger, felt surreal. But it also confirmed for me something I’m leery of declaring outright about any band before seeing them for myself, but something Pitchfork writer @douglasmartini found no hesitation in tweeting after the show: “Fleet Foxes are the best band.” Whether he’s referring to ‘Best in Seattle’ or ‘Best in 2011′ I couldn’t say for certain. After what I saw and heard last night, I’m having a real hard time arguing with either notion. Retweet!

Fleet Foxes at the Columbia City Theater ::: Photo by Josh Lovseth