The Stool Pigeon

There’s a strange magic about Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear that defies utterance, even more so than the tongue-twisting title of their latest LP. Critics have thus far tended to cast the Warp-signed quartet in neo- or freak- folk, psychedelic or chamber pop moulds, but none comes close to nailing the elemental forces at work in their best music.

After all, what mutant brand of folk could ever hope to encompass the changeling flutter of a song like ‘Easier’? And what chamber pop dives as deep as the outfit’s Crystals cover ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)’ from 2007’s ‘Friend’ EP, a track so beautiful it twists the deluded passion of the original into a tour de force of disquieting eroticism straight out of a David Lynch film?

On the phone from the annual SXSW festival in Texas, which officially declares networking season open in music industry circles, singer and founding member Ed Droste laughs the sort of laugh that’s not just been there, it’s already got the t-shirt. “We used to get the whole ‘freak-folk’ thing a lot, which I never liked,” he says.
“I think there’s this weird sense of authenticity with beards. People think you just emerged from the woods to lay down a record or something. We should’ve done that with the new one actually - grown beards and claimed to have survived on nothing but clams and oysters for six months.”

Founded as the bedroom project of Droste in 2003 and expanded to a four-piece by the time 2006’s outstanding sophomore disc Yellow House rolled around to rave reviews, Grizzly Bear are quite simply smarter than your average ursine, revelling in stealthy, suite-like expositions that defy easy explanation but repay the patient listener in kind.

Centred around soaring, chimerical harmony parts and Daniel Rossen’s reverb-laden guitar, which paradoxically seems to root the band more firmly in silence, it’s a classically-attuned vision lent heft by drummer Chris Bear’s understated theatrics and bassist Chris Taylor’s uniquely textured production style.

Rossen, alongside Droste one half of the band’s creative nucleus, elaborates: “I studied music when I was a teen and the stuff I obsessed over was heavy jazz and classical music. I’d say classical music is influential in terms of our chordal choices and movements. Maybe it’s an ADD thing, but I have a problem with repetition, whereas Ed has more of a modern pop sensibility - he’s really good at rounding out the songs and pacing them better.

“I don’t tend to think of the songs as difficult, but I feel all my favourite pop and rock records have this grasping, immediate quality that still bears out over repeated listens. I don’t even know that we’ve necessarily achieved that. Sometimes I think we either do accessible or not.”
Constructed over several months in three separate locations around the Eastern seaboard, Veckatimest (that’s veh-ka-ti-mest, after the Native American for an island on Cape Cod discovered by the group during recording) definitely announces itself as a more dynamic affair than Yellow House’s slowly evolving mood piece. This fact springs in part from a newly relaxed approach to songwriting, band members bunching off at random to produce tracks, where its predecessor essentially offered re-workings of songs penned by Droste and Rossen respectively.

“I’m really proud of this album,” says Droste. “I feel like it’s poppier than Yellow House. Songs like ‘Cheerleader’ and ‘Southern Point’ are more pop-oriented, whereas the last one was a really sepia-tinted, dreamy album; this has a lot more angles. I mean, it’s not a fucking punk rock album or anything, but still. Everyone’s a lot less precious with their songs now, which maybe wasn’t the case in the past. We’ve matured a lot. We’ve gone through a lot of growing pains. It’s like being in a relationship - you’ve got to let people have their moments before you go shooting them down!”

The results are uneven at times, but Veckatimest scales some truly majestic peaks, from the sublime pysch of ‘While You Wait For The Others’ to the bizarre, soft-rock chugging of ‘Ready/Able’, which morphs unexpectedly into a breathtaking pop coda of the most twinkle-toed variety.

As with the last album, a retreat to the countryside figures prominently in Veckatimest’s genesis, with recording sessions taking place in upstate New York and Cape Cod, the latter in a house provided by Droste’s grandmother. It’s one of the oddities thrown up by Grizzly Bear’s music that they manage to raise the spectre of the pastoral without making
explicit reference to the ‘old, weird America’ either in their song structures or their lyrics.

“Every space and environment produces different sounds,” says Droste. “We saw the area (Veckatimest) and got interested in the whole topography of the place. It’s difficult for me to imagine recording in the city - it’s important to be able to flush out ideas outside of town.”

Rossen agrees: “Ed likes to have his little retreats. He’s not too comfortable writing in the city. I’m a little more compulsive. I like writing at home and on tour. But some of the more bombastic moments on Veckatimest wouldn’t have ended up that way if we hadn’t been recording in this big, cathedral-type space which we could use at any time. I would just be getting up at seven in the morning and making the most horrific noise.”

The band has also gone on record acknowledging the role of the internet in their rise to prominence, a fact which sits somewhat weirdly with their complexity and the received wisdom that the web is fast eating away a generation’s collective attention span.

Says Droste of their ‘blog indie’ status: “Knowing how hard it was to get people listening to our music now, I can’t imagine what it would have been like 10 or 15 years ago. [The web] has been such a huge boon to us really. I’ve just got this gut feeling it wouldn’t have happened without it.”

As a purveyor of an epic musical sweep upholding the grand narrative tradition, the Grizzly Man’s conviction is our blessing. Maybe the internet does make you cleverer, after all.

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