Grizzly Bear

Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest
(Warp, 2009)

Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead created the prophecy of Veckatimest when he called Grizzly Bear his favorite band of 2008. Unsurprisingly, the album leaked in March and skinny-jeaned scallywags happily raised their skull and crossbones as they cyber-sailed to the namesake island. Veckatimest is, in fact, a real island off the coast of Cape Cod. Its isolated mystique, haunting Native American name, and under-the-table reference to Lost bloomed into Grizzly Bear’s art-rock fantasy. On Veckatimest, every measure of barebones syncopation is met with another of wave-crashing orchestration. Grizzly Bear tightened its arrangements, amped up the production values, narrowed its focus, and have finally achieved a sound that is both expansive and intimate. This album doesn’t just have its quirks—it is full-blown Spock-rock that will have audiences offering the split-finger salute rather than the sign of the devil.

Three years ago, name-dropping Grizzly Bear in most music circles would score you major points, because it meant that you took Arcade Fire seriously. The Brooklyn foursome burst onto the scene with overzealous vamping and trippy haiku lyrics that dubbed them “freak folk.” Their lo-fi phenomenon, Yellow House, snuggled into many best-of ’06 album picks, even though the album’s tinny, reverb-heavy sound didn’t always work. Pop-oriented dips like “Knife” proved the Grizzlies knew how to take a harmony or five from Brian Wilson. Then there were tracks like “Central and Remote” that swelled and swelled until the music became a dense fog. If only the Grizzlies made sense of these conceptual orchestrations, they would really be onto something.

Veckatimest is a brilliantly crafted “I told you so.” As the title suggests, the album opens up an exhilarating New World of sonic possibilities that makes Yellow House seem like a practice round. You know those bags that say, “I used to be a plastic bottle”? Veckatimest could easily say, “I used to be your Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young collection, plus your overplayed Fleet Foxes CD.” The Grizzlies didn’t get rid of anything—the subtle bedroom vocals, the faithful acoustic guitar and piano, and their favorite technique, vamping—are all supremely intact. They just took their cue from Captain Planet and recycled, reduced, and reused everything. Vocals have always been relatively secondary with the Grizzlies, but Droste’s personality rubs off big time, which makes them great. Droste is at his most lyrically evocative when he muses about the “wilder deep” on “Dory.” In the beginning of “Cheerleader”, he sounds positively bored with the stylized guitars and tame drum loops, and stops singing altogether when the pop layers have been stripped away to drummer Chris Bear’s single, blood-pulsing beat.

“Cheerleader” may have slighted the likes of Sandra Dee, but who are we kidding? “Two Weeks” is like pouring Pixy Stix directly into your ear. There is even a cute baby dancing to it on YouTube already! Beach House’s Victoria Legrand is behind the zany backup vocals that envelop the song like Saturn’s rings. The intro could be the jangling of Santa’s sleigh bells, and Droste sounds exactly like Morten Harket, which is honestly the best Christmas present anyone could ask for. In true Grizzly fashion, the song’s frills are hidden behind a façade of simplicity. The main melody sounds like a fourth-grader who just learned to play “Chopsticks” on the piano, but the reverb-laden guitars, celestial harmonies, and delirious beeps and chimes are all there too, coming and going at different times. All of this sounds distracting, even unpleasant. But Grizzly Bear found a way to make it all work, and they do it again on “While You Wait for the Others.” That’s what the babies are dancing about.

Like Yellow House, Veckatimest deals with the spatial realities of time and human relationships. Droste echoes: “There is time, so much time” (“Fine for Now”) while the watery guitar messes with the time signature, making the whole song just slightly disjointed. Then again, the song begins as a weepy ballad only to rear its brute head three quarters through into a full-on shredder, and then it’s all snowflakes in the last three seconds.

Every song has its own unique instrumental construction that is built up and broken down, vacillating between fantastical chaos and primitive unity. “Southern Point”, the first track, starts with two basic instruments—Droste’s lilting vocal inflections and an intricately weaving acoustic guitar—that escalate into a cacophony of psychedelic tambourine slaps and rapid drum beats that wind up sounding like the flipping shutters of an old-time train schedule. Then, the song deconstructs back to the acoustic guitar and rebuilds with a slightly different nuance. “All We Ask” employs the same kaleidoscopic effect, but in a more symphonic vein. A full minute of cello swoops and fanning guitars climaxes into a sit-down night with the Philharmonic and then peters out with this weird digital beep, like someone accidentally pressed the “eject” button. Nico Muhly, Bjork’s own string maestro, is the scrutinizing eye behind the arrangement and the other astral opuses, “Ready, Able” and “I Live with You.”

The album’s end brings us right into the “Foreground”, as if the whole album were built up to where it starts out—as Jack said to Kate in the season finale, “We have to go back [to the island].” But the course of the album is far from a linear one. The tracks themselves fluctuate between sunny pop tunes and submerged oeuvres, that, when added together, make this album a conceptual masterpiece. There are moments that make you feel like R.P. McMurphy and that your earbuds are really electrodes. It takes more than one listen—more than 10 listens—to begin to unpack, but Veckatimest simultaneously captures beauty and rhythm, discord and chaos on every track. The expectations for Grizzly Bear are now higher than ever, but from what we’ve seen so far, the Grizzlies don’t have any intention of falling short.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

Tags: Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest, Warp Records, Department of Eagles