The Decibel Tolls

Our first taste of big things to come was the live-debuted “While You Wait for the Others,” which tipped us off to several shifts occurring in the Grizzly Bear control room. The arraignment felt comparatively sparse, focusing largely on texture, and the pace seemed much more motivated. Indeed, at least some of the culture shock that comes with the first listen to their third album Veckatimest is in part due to the changes in the instrument palette. Still with us are the splintering guitars, gossamer vocal harmonies, and dark bass heavy strings, but the woodwinds and other orchestral ammunition are largely forgone in favor of a more economical rock band, and after several listens through, it’s still hard to pin down the group’s intentions. One part of me finds these 12 tracks to be fascinating attempts to derive monumental results from a modest four-piece set-up, but the creeping alternative reality is that of a band whom, approaching the release of their make-or-break with the mainstream album, have constructed an airtight vessel to carry themselves through the transition at the cost of the human, fallible elements that gave Yellow House its haunting presence.

Veckatimest opens as a pretty natural sounding progression with “Southern Point”. It’s sufficiently disorienting, and has a jazzy departure that compliments Dan Rossen’s locomotive picking, but the swells and crashes feel strangely fixed, grasped tight by some omniscient puppeteer. These tracks, while gorgeous as ever, swing straight for hook with heat-seeking melodies, and without the patience exemplified on earlier efforts, the ecstatic focal points of this album feel less deserved. One example is the hair-rippingly dull “Two Weeks”, an awful rock-hop that if released by any other band would be looked upon as mediocre. It’s inherently rigid structure is somewhat complimentary to Ed Droste’s lead vocals, but hardly to Dan’s, which feel extremely awkward against the rising tempo and forced pop posture. Sure, the singles like this are pretty and nicely wrapped, but so what? It feels like lazy perfection. All the turns are cornered, almost quantized, and in this new songwriting prowess that they exhibit, listeners gain a faith in Veckatimest that can quickly translate to boredom. Yellow House, and even Horn of Plenty to a degree, were fairly unpredictable listens, and in that way they were exciting no matter how many times you heard them. Now, with the obvious divide in creative control between Rossen’s loose folk tendencies and Droste’s secret desire to turn the sepia-toned period piece pop that he helmed first on “Knife” into a caricature of itself, it all feels uninhabited, and leaves only the faintest impression after you lift the needle off the record.

Now, with that in mind, it is safe to say that Veckatimest also holds some of Grizzly Bear’s most accomplished work. In many ways it is comparable to Merriweather Post Pavillion, “About Face” sounds directly influenced by Sung Tongs era AC, but the two are also very similar in terms of how they stand in context with the earlier releases. The production of the entire album is impeccable, and relishes in that undeniably classy sound that these boys have staked out for themselves over the past two albums. “Fine For Now” is simply stunning. The glass harmonics of the guitar and the tumbling bass form a flexible interplay that cruise sublimely into Rossen’s gentle refrain of “We’re all faltering/How’d I help with that?/If it’s all or not/Just let me go”. There are even a few case’s when Veckatimest succeeds in it’s dash towards a large-venue sound, like on “Ready, Able” which somehow manages to strike a compelling contrast of rollicking palm mutes and chamber-pop furnishing that builds palpable tension, giving the bridge that Je ne sais quoi which proved unattainable on many other attempts. “Dory” also makes good on its potential with an infectious bent melody and warped vocal harmonies that sound alien and almost reach for the paranoid splendor of recent tour mates Radiohead.

The somber closing piece, “Foreground”, punctuates Veckatimest in a similar way that “Colorado” did for Yellow House. It sounds tired, defeated, humble, in awe, and ultimately cathartic-if only they’d recorded all the songs in the same way. On its own, it’s a gut wrenching song, but it hardly summarizes the preceding experience, which has diminished into vapor trails by the time we arrive at the end. Though the album is not a wasted effort, housing both their most ingenious and bland arraignments, it is impossible to overlook the void of adventurous nature. Veckatimest is entirely confident in its form, strategy, and aesthetic, but with the self-imposed safety-parameters, it fails to allow itself to really breathe, and in the end, permits us only glimpses of the ghost in the machine.

Veckatimest is out now on Warp Records.

Fagen-Becker Quality Rating

[Editor's Note: Grizzly Bear has gotten so big that they now return a higher rank in a Google search than the animal grizzly bear. Day-amn. Oh, and dudes, have you seen Werner Hertzog's Grizzly Man? Dude lives with big fuckin' bears (not the band)! Crazy!]

MP3 :::
Grizzly Bear – Dory
Grizzly Bear – Fine For Now