AWmusic

In the last month there have been reviews of Veckatimest that explain the origin of the album’s four syllable title, a short biography of Brooklyn band and their recent history (Radiohead tours, talk show performances and philharmonic backing etc) as if these prologues are trying to cover up the fact that (for some) Grizzly Bear are a fairly new fully-formed band. Or maybe these contextual introductions take up the appropriate amount of space in an article for the relief of reviewer who hasn’t got anything more to say about the album other than “Two Weeks” is a deceptively jovial pop song. But hey, even this opening paragraph is 112 words long.
Veckatimest deserves a little more attention than an editorially challenged pithy catchphrase, especially when at the end of the year it’s probably going to be sitting on a golden throne next to Merriweather Post Pavilion, waiting to be crowned.
Naturally, for those who played Yellow House to death or cursed themselves with the bad-karma-serves-you-right-for-being-impatient, shitty album leak, this release manages to live up to its almost unrealistic expectations. Rather than continuing with an explicit Yellow House template (layered experimental folk and West Coast baby-boomer Americana) that could have perfectly exploited the post Fleet Foxes marketplace, Veckatimest works as a sonic divergence. Choppy time signatures, pounding drum fills and chunky riffs divide the songs into definite segments, and there is a pronounced use of the space that surrounds the sound of an instrument rather than crowding the mix with an abundance of proverbial bells and whistles. Not that these techniques haven’t been employed before, but the melodic flow of Yellow House, which evoked a kind of aural arcadia, seems to have been replaced by the artifice of a recording pretending to be a live band, which is more in keeping with how the four-piece play together away from the studio, while also containing the Chris Taylor flourishes now expected from a Grizzly Bear recording.
Differences and familiarities aside there’s much on Veckatimest that distinguishes the record as a testimony to the working Grizzly Bear model of 2009. The wielding of the vocal chords makes the voice the album’s most conspicuous instrument. There are the signature four-part harmonies, the choral arrangements of The Brooklyn Youth Choir and the augmented intonations of Edward Droste and Daniel Rossen. The unearthly intro to “Dory” and the polyphonic climaxes of “Fine For Now” are (the most obvious) examples of a band exhibiting an accomplished a cappella technique that accompanies the more regular sounds of the electric and the acoustic rather than deputizing for them, and the traditional instrumentation sometimes sounds far from traditional. For every upfront guitar strum on “Southern Point” (a kind of distant relative to Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill”) or insistent pop plunk on “Two Weeks” – there are the more esoteric noises of a vibrating spooky organ on “Ready, Able” or the stomping bass of “I Live With You.” Veckatimest sounds all the more enriched for these and other musical jigsaw pieces, with funny shapes that shouldn’t fit but do, which maybe make this album less immersive than their last, but all the more lasting in a way that only reveals itself to you once it has been lived with for a considerable amount of time.
Lyrically the songs address the typical existential anxieties that come with the failures of our intimacies and the white noise awareness of mortality, but some may argue, like Woody Allen, that death and love are the only two things that matter in this short life of ours. We may be “all faltering” and there might not be “anything left” but kudos to Grizzly Bear for including the words, “routine malaise” in a commercial pop song, without sounding like pretentious prigs.
The details and intricacies of Veckatimest show Grizzly Bear to justify more than a lazy Brian Wilson (or even Van Dyke Parks) comparison, but in a world full of sound bites that belie surface level opinions, such juxtapositions come in handy. Grizzly Bear deserve a little more than that, and on Veckatimest they create music with depth, to be lived with, that gets better as it ages with you, which can only really become part of the cosmic soundtrack, the great big compilation multi-tracked opus that plays in the background of a life.

Grizzly Bear – Fine For Now
Grizzly Bear – Cheerleader

Tags: album