There are less of the trademark vocal harmonies with Droste or Rossen each often singing on their own and echoing off of each others’ voices as though to reinforce the albums’ overarching themes of loneliness and solitude. It is an effect that is achieved largely through processes of fragmentation and isolation whereby the individual elements of the band’s compositional technique have been delineated, deconstructed and allowed the room to breathe. With their latest album, Shields, Grizzly Bear seems to have made a conscious choice to seek out and foreground such moments of emotional honesty, and they have done so without sacrificing their unique and adventurous approach to their craft. Or even in the calculated simplicity of “Knife”, as its sparse and skeletal instrumental arrangement opened up space for the haunting vocal melody to softly unfurl and reveal itself.
You could hear it from the very beginning as “Deep Sea Diver” lurched from anxious acoustic downstrokes into its screeching climax of guitar distortion and tumultuous cymbals and snares. Even the ubiquitous “Two Weeks”, with its sensuous melodies and timeless song-craft evocations, glows with a sheen so perfectly polished that the song, along with the rest of Veckatimest, can feel something like the experience of owning a piece of furniture that is so finely crafted and pristinely varnished that you are afraid to actually use it.īut there has always been a cathartic energy lurking just beneath the ostentatious surface of Grizzly Bear’s music.
If there’s a demonstrable critique to be leveled at the band’s work thus far, it’s that their high minded aspiration of creating pop music as fine art has at times sacrificed emotional immediacy for a clinical level of technical precision and a meticulously wrought aesthetic complexity. Each member plays a critical role in the cultivation of this sound with Droste and Daniel Rossen trading off on lead vocals, guitars and keys while drummer Chris Bear and multi-instrumentalist Chris Taylor breathe life and energy into the band’s baroque compositions, assembling rhythmic foundations that are both understated and deceptively complex. As more and more of their indie rocking peers drifted into the swirling bloops and bleeps of programmed electronic music, Grizzly Bear remained committed to organic instrumentation, achieving their instantly recognizable sound through the harmonic complexities of detuned guitars and multilayered voices, accentuated by intricate yet understated rhythms and a fluid, nonlinear approach to the structural arrangement of these elements. From the project’s modest beginnings as Ed Droste’s lo-fi home recording project, through Yellow House’s psych-folk experimentations and culminating with Veckatimest’s ornately detailed indie-pop, Grizzly Bear’s defining characteristic throughout has been a hunger for perfection. Grizzly Bear is a band that has spent its entire career pushing against the boundaries of possibility within its own inherently limited medium of popular song.
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