New from Grizzly Bear

Last Thursday Grizzly Bear played to a sold out Cat’s Cradle with opening band Here We Go Magic. I was there along with fellow Vinyl Press writer Matt Poindexter and I have to say I was expecting a lot out of the show. After all Grizzly Bear blew me away with their Yellow House, their 2nd full length released in 2006 on Warp Records, and after only a week or so of listening to their new album Veckatimest the jury was still out.

But there’s no doubt that these are consummate musicians and the set they played, a glorious retrospective of their earlier efforts interspersed with about half the cuts off the new records was more than enough to validate the hype surrounding this Brooklyn based quartet. Particularly stunning was how they were able to create such deeply textured renditions of their already expansive songs in a live setting. My personal favorites from Yellow House were “Colorado”  and “Little Brother’, the latter complete with an elongated take on the haunting refrain “Pride of my countrymen/ My little brother will be born again.” The set opened with the first cut on the new album, “Southern Point” and included another memorable number in “While You Wait For The Others.”

I encourage anyone who hasn’t heard this group yet, or for that matter any skeptics of the new record to check out a couple of videos that I think give a little taste of the wonder and beauty of their music, their sound is honestly unlike alomst anything else out there right now. If pressed to find a reference point, I would have to draw a comparison between their songs and a great landscape paiting by the likes of Gustave Klimt (see “Church in Cassone“, 1913) because of the magnetic quality of both, they draw you in deeper and deeper with each listen or glance.

The first video is the first from the new album, the second track called “Two Weeks” and is directed by Patrick Daughters, and honestly I don’t know what to make of it, but here’s to a revival of some good old Doo-wop:

The second is from a french website called La Blogotheque, that features a section called “Concerts a Emporter” (“shows to go”), wherein various groups, usually from the indie/alternative/blues scene play in back alleys and strange settings around Paris live in one continuous shot, filmed almost always by Vincent Moon. The site is well worth checking out, I’ve spent hours mesmerized by the intimate performances before, but one of my favorites is Grizzly Bear’s a Capella version of “Knife,” which is amazing even without instruments:

enjoy the rain,

Adam Sherwood