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haven’t been employed before, but the melodic flow of Yellow House, which evoked a kind of aural arcadia, seems to have been replaced by the artifice of a recording pretending to be a live band, which is more in keeping with how the four-piece play together away from the studio, while also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

Here We Go Magic – Tunnel Vision

Here We Go Magic is the new outfit fronted by Luke Temple and this track has been popping up on websites everywhere as a precursor to the debut album, much like the seven-inch single used to do years ago (released February 24th on Western Vinyl). As this song indicates and the album augments, this isn’t an electro-folk digression but an expansive and inclusive exploration into the idioms of folk, electro-trickery and muted recording techniques.
Here We Go Magic – Tunnelvision

Sleeping States – Rivers

Markland Starkie AKA Sleeping States is the kind of artist you want to hold to your bosom and keep as your own and unfairly/secretly hope no one else is going to find, even though he’s be around for a while now (There the Open Spaces will be the grand old age of two this year). But in these months of relative hibernation Starkie’s lethargic lullabies are the kind of songs that perfectly complement a slower way of life.
Sleeping States – Rivers

Real Estate – Suburban Beverage

This new band made up of members of Predator Vision and Ducktails are currently being touted as the kind of outfit you want to hear on a beach holiday when the air feels as if it’s on fire and people start wearing ridiculous looking summer clothes. But the listless jangle of Suburban Beverage with its weary vocals and guitars peals form a befitting calm winter soundtrack to play in the movie of your life – when you aren’t doing very much at all.

Real Estate – Suburban Beverage

Everything was as it should have been a few days ago. 2009 was just an empty cultural vessel waiting to be filled and the ghosts of last year’s music players, end of year lists and conversational exchanges were still hanging around, waiting to be replaced. It could have been another predictably desolate January, but then Animal Collective had to go ahead and ruin it by releasing their “best recorded album.” Just as the usual seasonal torpor descended upon us, the band effectively pressed a ctrl/alt/del button on our wintertime psyches by delivering one of the best albums of 2009, and long before anyone else had a chance. Now the bleak winter visions don’t look so bad and the cold doesn’t get to your bones as much as it should when your finger presses repeat on your listening device, again and again and again…
Merriweather Post Pavilion is a ridiculously euphoric album, full of Animal Collective’s signature sonic techniques. The tribal rhythms, the choral chants and the bubbling background noises are all still bumping into one another in joyous ways, but the crunching dissonance, elongated passages and bleating yelps of old have evaporated to present a new streamlined, almost pop version of the band. As Strawberry Jam revealed in places and last year’s live shows explicitly confirmed, they’ve now ditched the freak-folk and embraced electronic psychedelia, and on Merriweather Post Pavilion they’ve reaped the benefits by melding the primal pulse-quickening excitement of dance music to the warmth of emotional connection and the exhilaration of just being alive.
The low-end bass may manipulate rising heartbeats and the constant peaking of the repeated song climaxes may mimic house music’s obvious ecstatic amphetamine based mores, but the content of the songs themselves manage to belie the traditions of the dance music form by infusing a very real sense of excitement into the listening experience by addressing the joy of sensation, physical satisfaction and even out of body experiences. Avey Tare sings about watching dancers, walking around town and wanting to “leave my body, just for a while,” whereas Panda Bear advocates domestic security, doing what his body wants to and asks confusingly if he is “really all the things that are outside of me?”
For many of the contrary appreciators of Animal Collective who still hold Sung Tongs up as the pivotal ground zero of the band’s career, Merriweather Post Pavilion will seem like a disappointing commercial realignment of a cherished experimental band. But despite the absence of the familiar baying cacophonies that used to typify the Animal Collective sound and the subsequent electronic re-shaping of their musical identity, Merriweather Post Pavilion is still a remarkably unique album and one that could have only come from this band. Not a single song feels out of place or lacks the exhilarating incantation of the shared vocals and the songs are sequenced perfectly together with detailed textures that increase the infectious joy of listening to tracks like, “My Girls”, “Brother Sport” and “Summertime Clothes” continuously in a loop, and if that is your bent you won’t want Merriweather Post Pavilion to ever stop playing between your ears.

Animal Collective – My Girls
Animal Collective – Brothersport
Animal Collective – Summertime Clothes

**Links removed by request, Web Sheriff pwnage**

Apart from the fact it has an obvious motorik rhythm and the song’s thrust is the perfect aural accompaniment to watching cars eat up the white lines in the middle of the road, this Deerhunter track manages to represent the essential dichotomy of travelling in a motor vehicle. The contrast between the moving world outside and still world within a car is significant, like a song called “Nothing Ever Happened” that has a lot happening within it.
Deerhunter – Nothing Ever Happened

Best Song From A Band Named After An Animal
Animal Collective – Seal Eyeing

Putting Animal Collective in this category may be a little too literal, but once again Animal Collective release an arresting stopgap EP between albums and the Water Curses EP will maybe seem like the ideal bridge between Strawberry Jam and Merriweather Post Pavilion when we have the benefit of hindsight, but beneath the aquatic bubbling sounds that introduce “Seal Eyeing” there exists a fragile reverberating piano odyssey made for moments of graceful meditation.
Animal Collective – Seal Eyeing

Best Song Influenced By Pet Sounds
Department of Eagles – No One Does It Like You

The ghost of “God Only Knows” echoes through this track but Department of Eagles deliver pleasing layer after layer of ornate sounds, which only reveal themselves fully after repeated listens. Like many of the tracks on In Ear Park, the rich production values seem to offer an opportunity to get lost in a world of detailed instrumentation, which is surely the intention behind the same techniques used by Brian Wilson, all those years ago.
Department Of Eagles – No One Does It Like You

Best Song To Contemplate The Fragility Of Existence With
Chad Van Gaalen – Rabid Bits of Time

Chad Van Gaalen sings about death on Soft Airplane, sometimes with cheeky abandon in chirpy sounding songs that are designed to get under the skin, but nowhere is the flimsy thread of mortality personified so appropriately than on “Rabid Bits of Time.” When Gaalen sings in his quivering voice, “No one knows where we go, when we’re dead or when we’re dreaming,” it’s like listening to someone telling you something you already know, but never really understood until it is disclosed as simply as it is here.
Chad Van Gaalen – Rabid Bits of Time

Best Song That Ends With A Whimper
Women – Black Rice

“Black Rice” clangs along like a lost art rock classic from a late 60s, which for once doesn’t sound like it is an amateur appropriation, reshaped and regurgitated into a diluted version of the original music that influenced its creation. Glockenspiels tinkle with the guitars to lead to a climax that never comes as the momentum abruptly ends with a limp strum, and after all the musical pay-offs that have become so commonplace it’s refreshing to hear a song that causes you to listen to its journey because it doesn’t conclude with a bang or a fade.
Women – Black Rice

Given the pseudo krautrock guitar work he displayed in his former band, The Secret Machines, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to anticipate Benjamin Curtis channeling the sonic mojo of Michael Rother in his new three-piece, School of Seven Bells, but as the first bars of the opening track “Iamundernodisguise” introduces Alpinisms with the combined chant of two vocalists who unfortunately sing in the same ethereal tone as the saccharine pop outfit The Corrs, hopeful expectations are soon annihilated in the first few seconds. Thankfully, when Curtis’ guitars blast into the song a tasteful equilibrium is restored and the traumatic memories of sickly vocal-styles are eradicated and the band make sense, but it’s a regrettable frame of reference to commence with.
Vocal prejudices aside, Alpinisms corresponds to the proverbial treated guitar textures and airy female voices regularly found in the shoegazer catalog and Curtis seems to be also emulating the guitar woos of Kevin Shields (“Face to Face on High Places” sounds uncannily like a remixed Loveless track). But it’s not all spaced-out guitar effects and siren-like singing, “White Elephant Coat” is bass driven old-school goth (as in graveyards and bats) and “Connjur” throbs with a post-rock momentum that’s meant to be heard on the inside of sleek cars as they float through West German landscapes of concrete and steel.
The galvanizing aspect of Alpinisms and its disparate influences comes from the electro arrangements that elevate the otherwise diluted facsimiles of experimental guitar from the musical history books. Synth textures echo along with the guitars and electronic tempos adorn all of the tracks here to make this debut more than just a means of looking backward to look forward. Even the vocals delivered by twin sisters, Alejandra and Claudia Deheza surpass the too appeasing by far timbres employed by the thousands of fluffy soon-to-be-forgotten pop bands, when the choral layers develop into musical mantras or are fed through a vocoder. School of Seven Bells may take their name from a well-known institution where pickpockets learn their nefarious trade, but as much as the separate ingredients of the Alpinisms recipe regurgitate the familiar, there’s little here that comes across as downright stealing.

School of Seven Bells – Face to Face on High Places
School of Seven Bells – Connjur