A Round of Sound

Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest [Warp; released 5/26/2009]

“While you wait for the others to make it all worthwhile, all your useless pretensions are weighing on my time.”

“While You Wait For The Others”

Much of the year’s best releases owe their success to a new found accessibility in the music, and no band refined their sound more from a previous release than Brooklyn’s (where else?) Grizzly Bear, whose 3rd album Veckatimest makes it to the top of my list as the best album of 2009.  It wasn’t as if 2006’s Yellow House was a bad album, but it did peg Grizzly Bear as a ambient and boring band whose music didn’t really go anywhere, save for a couple excellent exceptions.  However, the songs on Veckatimest don’t meander nearly as much and contain actual, honest to God, melodies.  Grizzly Bear still retains their atmospheric tendencies and signature harmonies that characterized Yellow House, but the the songs are more traditional and much more memorable and strike a perfect balance between their experimental ambitions and straightforward pop to create an absolutely triumphant album.

You don’t have to look any further to find what Veckatimest does so well than the two opening tracks “Southern Point” and my song of the year “Two Weeks” which are rivaled only by the openers on Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix as the best one-two opening punch of any album this year. “Southern Point” is the psych-folk opener led by Daniel Rossen that introduces the album in a way that almost seems like an appetizer for 11 tracks that follow.  It leads into “Two Weeks” which is as standard of a pop song Grizzly Bear has ever written.  An instantly memorable piano hook backs the entire song which is carried by glorious harmonies thanks in part to guest vocals from Beach House’s Victoria Legrand.  From there the album wonders back and forth from orchestral tunes to other examples of sophisticated pop such as “Cheerleader” and “While You Wait For The Others”.  Veckatimest is a meticulously crafted record in every sense, from its production to superb songwriting.  It’s an album that many bands in similar boats as Grizzly Bear have probably tried to create, but not every band has the dedication and better yet, ability, to be able to create something so majestic.

[“Two Weeks” – Veckatimest]

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 11:32 am and is filed under All, Music, Top Albums of 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.