It bridged the experimental volitations of the first album with a malt shop pop catchiness, and it sold over 300,000 copies worldwide. In 2009, everything changed with Veckatimist, named after an obscure Massachusetts island not far from Martha's Vineyard, which was very much a Grizzly Bear thing to do. It came out on Warp, and it was a beautiful, weird, cozy album that chanced to come out at time when that was exactly what people were looking for. The spindly guitars sound like they could decompose at any second. There are cinematic found sounds, towering Sequoia falsettos, and macabre whistles. The booming reverb made their voices feel high-beamed and almost Benedictine. The real debut is 2006's Yellow House, where they come off like a psychedelic barber shop quartet, chopped and scuffed, very white but sly soulful. Because they were original, none of these descriptions feel right. Maybe Jeff Buckley trying to sound like The Beach Boys of Smiley Smile, with minor genuflections to Elliott Smith, Steely Dan, Radiohead, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Morrissey, Brian Eno, and Bjork. If you want to play the sound-alike game, there is no direct analogue. They weren't as outwardly collegial as Vampire Weekend, thinking man's frat-boy like The National or The Hold Steady, or as cool party dad edgy as James Murphy. You heard chamber pop a lot, but honestly, what does that even mean? That always seemed reductive, but Grizzly Bear have always been a hard band to pin down. Because it was the mid-00s and Arthur Magazine was a thing, Grizzly Bear got lumped in under the freak folk umbrella alongside Animal Collective, Devendra Banhart, and 17 beards to be named later. He quickly expanded to a quartet alongside fellow NYU classmates, drummer Chris Bear, and multi-instrumentalists Daniel Rossen and Chris Taylor. It was Droste who originally formed Grizzly Bear as a solo project in 2004. "Everywhere I turn I'm like, 'You did that? You said that? You made this? You just put out that? What is going on?'" "I'm constantly confused and surprised by what's being released and praised in the music world, the same way that I'm constantly shocked at how insane Trump is," the lanky singer with the seraphic falsetto continues.
He's not a member, but somewhere along in the PR machinery the location was suggested, and it seemed less contrived than going for a group Runyon Canyon hike that screamed, "NYC BAND MOVES TO LA, GETS SUNTAN." "The best word to use is baffled," Ed Droste, one of the group's two vocalists says when we meet at Neuehouse, a flavorless members-only luxury freelancer cage in Hollywood.
Streaming only magnifies the importance of the Spotify Playlisted single over the album.
Even "independent" music publications are owned by someone else. Relevant guitar rock bands and quiet dignity are rare. Now, the popular solo music blog doesn't exist. In last half of the 00s, Blogspot nurtured Grizzly Bear's ascent from lo-fi halo folk Brooklyn band to indie rock avatars scoring Ryan Gosling melodramas. With breaking news, tangential gossip, video pivots, and social media shares driving traffic metrics, serious music criticism has almost become an oxymoron. This is a long way to ask the question: Can a Grizzly Bear album matter in 2017? In an era when artful polemics, Antonoffed pop, and self-medicated party rap hold sway, this week's Painted Ruins is a gorgeous requiem reminding us that art for the sake of aesthetic beauty and veiled self-confessional remains as meaningful as ever.īut the industry and conversation surrounding it could never seem more meaningless.
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