Coming to Grizzly Bear late, and in a silent room in order to hear each of the nuances raved about by my peers, "Yellow House" was striking from song to song. Given undivided patience, no song could be mistaken for another. So the desire to rush to the first and gnarliest copy of "Veckatimest" available was, despite the year I spent without care for Grizzly Bear at all, hard to resist. Throwing out my first copy for a new version, and then another, gave a chink to the armor of critical meditation, but the modern music critic is an addict and a champion of his idols; the addict's impulse dominates.
"Veckatimest," named for an uninhabited island in Massachusetts, is a wallowing, aquatic experience at times and is less instrumentally and rhythmically diverse than "Yellow House." No bit rate upgrade will change this, but it doesn't entirely matter. Rarely is production, or its being garbled by a bad rip, so distracting as to change a critic's rating. Even on the roughest tracks, such as "About Face" and "All We Ask," I saw each instrument, each embellishment as lovely little organic presences expressing themselves endearingly and non-verbally. Like Beach House, Grizzly Bear hinge a lot on atmosphere; that "Veckatimest" isn't having Ed Droste sing in your ear so intimately you can feel his breath is no problem. What we get instead is a sweet choir adding urgency to rumination and glittery guitar adding patience to pop.
On "About Face," there is a little squeak of something, not to mention some billowing flutes and a few hair-tosses of drums, that add such delicacy to an otherwise skippable song. It's more Annuals than Grizzly Bear (and Annuals take a certain kind of heart to enjoy, so it's a good thing not every song on this album is like this. When a friend said on first listen of this album, "Snooze city," I suspect they were talking about "About Face.")
The biggest surprise on the album is "Two Weeks," an anchor track firmly gripping the seabed of "Leno," the radio, and any other apparatus that can spread a virus. It is, as you might imagine from that designation, an undeniably great song, a cheerful welcome mat at the foot of the album, that I suspect will compel hugs and dances and a kind of "Hey Ya!" exuberance in every listener. The slowly creeping "Dory," on the other hand, sees the band returning to the companionship of "Yellow House," with eerie guitar strokes and a group of voices' ghostlike melodic descent as the song spins slowly out of pleasing keys and into a darker order.
"Ready, Able" is perfection. The song that starts prettily enough, but turns at about two minutes into a haunting merry-go-round blur of organs shimmying and manipulated keys and voices wallowing ominously, with a guitar entering late to direct all of them through with solemn urgency. As almost always with this band, the lyrics are private and sparse. Droste only hints at the music's colorful woe by turning the title of the song on its head. "Ready, Able" is not as optimistic in the song as it is in theory:
"Time is cast once; and far alone.
Hope I'm ready, able to make my own;
goodbye."
As the song descends, he dolefully exclaims, over and over: "They go we go, I want you to know, what I did I did." The guitar strikes out strongly, though in pain, as a kind of counterpoint, a competitor.
In the tension-building "I Live WIth You," there is some of Dirty
Projectors' theatrical choral work, anchored as if by David
Longstreth's jerking between the cute guitar/dirty guitar and meek
voice/angry voice dichotomies. This stunning song only suffers for
being such a clear denouement and coming so headily into our midst
after so many calm songs. It reveals itself as such by being
protractedly chaotic and exhausted at turns.
The final two tracks of the album are in my mind inextricable and, as one, feed the listener with so much of the album's skill and well-sharpened sadness. "Foreground," the final track, comprises the facts that appear before the mess of "I Live With You," something far more monstrously beautiful than "Foreground"'s emotional flat earth, full of acceptance and somber normalcy that the moodiness and instrumentally violent "I Live With You" wouldn't understand. "Foreground"'s melody is almost stupidly simple. That is to say, the listener, dissecting its simple see-saw melody, feels stupid for being so deeply affected by it. But it's Droste's entrance, his response to the piano melody, that makes the song so arresting. Its chilly atmosphere is a relief from the previous storm, but tests our emotional endurance with its own unique assertions. That a handful of distinctly beautiful songs can coexist so rebelliously yet so comfortably is worthy of the highest praise. This band is the whole package: intelligent composers, revisionists, and good curators of their body of work.
