A former associate editor at Stylus, Derek Miller currently contributes to Resident Advisor. While he does reside in the northern country, he should not be confused with this febrile impostor.
You’re tired of reading about this one. I understand. Like many of you, I feel like I burned out on this before I’d really heard it. Maybe you were sick of all the web chatter and hysterics before its release date—May 26th, a day that’s hard to attach to how long we’ve been living with THE NEXT GRIZZLY BEAR RECORD. I had to put that 128 leak away; I began to feel like I was searching for errors in a third-rate Gauguin reproduction (later: there are fucking woodwinds on this record???). Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest—this most divisive of near-masterpieces or testaments to indie pretension. Perspective. Rarely are indie records received in such diametrical opposition. Do you know anyone who kind of likes Veckatimest? On the other hand, I’ve heard critics I know and trust use terms like ‘loathe’ privately. Loathe? This? Fuck. Have you heard the Dirty Projectors’ latest Afro-tinged opus? That’s a record I could understand feeling some negative passion toward—that glassbreak screech. Otherwise, let’s save the loathing for big-world things: the Freddie Mac boys and the Bernie Madoffs.
In any case, the Passion has yet to really make any statement on the issue. Jeff, who as you all know, may just run the sharpest blog on the web, asked me if I’d like to share a few words on the subject. More than honored, I said good God yes of course (and then quibbled over ‘a few’). You can let your guard down though; this isn’t really a review. It’s a crude smear of words I’d like to offer on Veckatimest. I reviewed the two-cd version of Horn of Plenty, Yellow House, and, less favorably, the Friends EP for Stylus Magazine, where Jeff and I used to write together.
Like many who have followed the Brooklyn band for years, I watched as they expanded from a static hushed one-dude-in-a-bedroom project into a full-grown, and interdependent, quartet. They merged talents and voices. They felt themselves out as a ‘band’ and ensemble. They began to lean on each other for their segues, for their more robust outbreaks of pitch and sound; they began to write together, to tell each other that that simple piano ballad could use some oboe. They learned that sometimes the best accidents need to be heard just the way they were stumbled upon. I’ve seen them live; their harmonies were massive goosebump things, like Crosby Stills & Nash with a taste for absinthe instead of cannabis. I had to leave before the main act, Feist, even took the stage.
I adored the formless largesse of Yellow House—a record with few songs you cling to. It’s based on moments—transitions, bridges, elements of surprise. You have to swallow it almost whole, this epic spun by rough fingers but deft hands that, “Knife” or “Colorado” aside, really had no time for singles or lead teasers. But even so, it was seeing them live that made me think Grizzly Bear had an indie masterwork of sorts in them. Veckatimest ain’t it, but it’s enough to strengthen the belief of fans and admirers that they’re closer than ever.
Looking backward quickly, Yellow House was a document of creative wanderlust for Grizzly Bear. Fond of detours and side-routes, the band’s second record preferred the untaken to the well-tracked and -tumbled. A kind of tramper’s voyage. Just as oriented toward journeys then, their much-anticipated third, Veckatimest, takes this vagabond spirit and gives it an outdated map to work with, a weather-beaten thing that probably bears no resemblance to these paths of theirs but at least familiarizes them with a sense of terrain.
Where Yellow House’s earthy, big-screened vistas often felt overwhelming, if beautifully so, with so few crags to get your hand-holds on, Veckatimest is a bit easier record to summit. The lengthy asides and detours are still there—the record has so many pockets of distraction in its oddly-assembled songs. Many passages evade traditional simple song structures in favor of drifting, but the difference here is that Grizzly Bear no longer sacrifices their sense of pop expediency. As such, the album contains an odd personal take on classical alt-universe pop songs. For so much air under its wings though, this is one painstakingly crafted and meticulous album. If anything, its spaciousness sometimes feels too well-considered, too worked over to get so much navigational elbow room. “Two Weeks” is the easiest song to point to clearly: an old-fashioned piano romp with big boxy drums and the po’ boy gospel of their harmonies. It was the focus of early leaks, the holy-shit-they’ve-done-it here for a reason: it’s both timeless and utterly bound to the statementeering of indie rock in May 2009. A strangely insistent pop nugget of sorts, you could almost see it getting radio play. Not on college radio or the Current or anything, but on an oldies channel disc-jockeyed by a grayhair who found the LP on his grandson’s floor and assumed it was borrowed from his own stash—this blocky pink and forest green abstraction on the cover, old.
Fittingly, “Two Weeks” is paired with “All We Ask,” a track of broken motion for such direct charms. It’s a natural coupling: two cherry-sweet songs that may or may not date back to 1958. Beginning with Edward Droste’s youth-pale voice offering what’s probably my favorite line on the album, a woozy summons of the many locales and empty churches the record was recorded in—“In this old house, I’m not alone”—the band expands its acoustic intro into one of their martial drum charges; Chris Bear churns through Rossen’s voice as he takes the helm. At first I thought this was a Victorian ghost song; that too would be awesome. But it’s a story of distance and spaces you try to close too quickly. Just as its quiet-loud dynamics begin to sound a little stale—and given the band’s work since Yellow House, perhaps a little obvious—they retreat into one of those small swerves that define Veckatimest. It’s a dusty twilight-dim corner and a gorgeous harmony that lets them finish what they started to tell us: “I can’t get out of what I’m into with you” (in an interview with Drowned in Sound, Daniel Rossen lets us in on why “All We Ask” sounds so distinctly structured: “Bear had originally done this song on piano with Ed, and it was very somber and beautiful with a completely different set of darker chords. I, for some reason, decided to flip it around, do it on guitar and make the whole chord progression much happier. . .”). Elsewhere, “Southern Point” absolutely soars, an uneven first-flight song that misses the air at points only to dive and recover itself. Beneath insistent piano and organ rolls, Chris Bear’s drums channel the song into froth, before the band reclines into a near-beardo acoustic guitar bridge that could have featured on any America or Crosby, Stills & Nash record.
I mentioned the band’s many recording locales above: the famed Glen Tonche estate in New York, the Cape Cod house of Droste’s own grandmother, and, significantly, a church in New York City. It’s hard to listen to Veckatimest without hearing these various birthing places in its musty, spacious play. It’s a record in love with its own sounds—not only those recorded but those captured, those hushed ambient moments. Often, it almost sounds like it might have been played live in an open field in red-and-gold October, mic’d every fifty feet or so but for the drums. “Dory” in particularly resembles wilted, third-generation vinyl; its middle passages are almost sooty. Early live-favorite “Cheerleader” is antiquated white-boy soul; another good example of the band’s talent for a kind of refined restlessness structurally. Nothing really happens. There’s moaning, pattering drums, even a children’s choir; the song’s slow, inert pacing is what gets them lampooned as ‘boring’ often, But that might be taking too limited an outlook on Grizzly Bear’s designs; it’s a brand of atmospherics that owes as much to ambient music or even instrumental folk as it does to more traditional pop music structuring. Soothing, cushioned window-gazing music for the layabout.
If Veckatimest is shy of whatever we consider greatness in 2009 though, it’s because sometimes the band leans too heavily on this very ‘shapelessness.’ The stretch that runs from “Ready, Able” to “ Hold Still” (everyone has their own version of where this stretch lies) trades vagabonding for endless tramping. If some critics are going to chide Grizzly Bear as ‘boring’’—aside, this is a lazy criticism on a message board; in print it looks goddam careless—this is where they come the closest. They rely too heavily on their own thick sense of atmospherics, neglecting their moments where slight left-turns reveal unexpected treasures. They conceal nothing; they’re guileless, tracks without shadows.
Fortunately then, in grace if not speed, Veckatimest closes like Mine That Bird. “While you Wait for the Others”—the oldest song here—is an impatient, almost pushy epic. Forget waiting for the others; Grizzly Bear can’t even wait for the chorus. They jump right in after the barest exposition. The song’s built of two distinct tempos: morning-brained and noon-fiery, quickly rousing to clanging guitars, sweeping harmonies and Chris Bear’s chunky drum part. But it’s closer “Foreground” that’s perhaps been improperly overlooked thus far. From the surface, it’s Veckatimest’s simplest song: just strings, a piano and a bass drum. Ed Droste lends the song with a quaint domesticity with starkly laid out lines. When he intones “take all evening, I’ll just be cleaning” and the music goes silent, briefly, you feel the track’s homespun roots, its patient sense of love and attention. Both lyrically and emotionally, it captures Satie’s notion of musique d’ameublement—just like the character Droste details, his is a presence that should be both comforting but forgettable. It’s the sense of someone waiting on you without hanging or pestering, this quiet love of custom and comfort that comes from long-acquaintance. And, frankly, that’s exactly what Veckatimest is: this aged, oft-peaceful thing you feel you’ve known since youth. I have a feeling Grizzly Bear will go on to make better records. But Veckatimest might well be the one you return to most fondly. It’s an album with flaws you grow cozy with over time—a gorgeous thing with a tiny cheek-scar whose eyes are all you see anyway. As we all know, those are the ones you keep close.
Download:
MP3: Grizzly Bear-“Cheerleader”
MP3: Grizzly Bear-“Two Weeks” (Live on Letterman)
MP3: Grizzly Bear-“While You Wait for the Others” (Live On KRCW)
