Tough to write about, but easy to listen to: Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest is, perhaps, the most ornate, perfectly composed, fully realized album on this list, and quantifying why it’s so good without devolving into rote amateur music theory might be the biggest challenge I’ve faced yet.
I don’t want to conjure an image of the tortured writer, face bedraggled and flecked with five o’clock shadow, nursing a glass of whiskey as he struggles to find the right combination of words. In fact, as I write this, I’m comfortable in an old Patriots hoodie and slippers, and my hair looks fairly neat today. I don’t hold such a deep emotional connection to Grizzly Bear and this record that I can’t have a word out of place, lest I do disservice to a band that has inspired great passion in me. No, Grizzly Bear doesn’t make my soul raw with the feels, nor am I particularly married to any of their other (very good, but still) records; I just like Veckatimest a great deal, and I’d love to be able to describe it to you.
It’s not even a particularly weird album, either. I mean, it’s weird in the pantheon of pop music at large, in the sense that it’s an intricate record without a lot of big hooks (“Two Weeks” notwithstanding, which you’ve likely heard in a commercial or an episode of How I Met Your Mother), but under the umbrella of indie-rock, Grizzly Bear sounds like Ed Sheeran compared to, say, Animal Collective. I suppose it’s somewhat folksy, but not in the big, U2-with-banjos way of Mumford & Sons; I’m reminded more of Neil Young gone electric, or My Morning Jacket’s big, reverb-ed, canyon-like wall of sound. But then there’s craftsmanship in the vein of the great pop composers: of Phil Spector, of Brian Wilson, of classic Brill Building sound construction. Indeed, the layering of vocal harmonies and the use of angelic choirs to augment the instrumentation calls to mind Wilson’s most transcendently beautiful moments, or even some of the more imaginative flights of fancy found tucked away in Queen records.
It’s beautiful, is what I’m saying. I don’t want to take away from the songwriting when I say it doesn’t directly attack my emotions like so many nakedly confessional indie-rockers do; it’s just that music, pure, beautiful music, is at the core of what makes Veckatimest tick so confidently. It’s an evocative record, with moments so rapturous that it causes an involuntary physical reaction akin to hearing great moments in classical pieces. It’s the Handel, the Mozart, the Tchaikovsky of its day.
Hyperbolic? Who’s to say? Who’s to say that the apocalyptic acoustic guitar flecks in the driving, haunting opener “Southern Point”, or the majestic choral intro to “Dory”, or the rising and falling countermelodies in “Two Weeks” aren’t perfectly composed enough to keep company with the originators? Witness closing track “Foreground”, which functions as a relatively no-frills piano ballad (albeit one with a lurching, fractured melody so potent you don’t really notice) until a lengthy choral build flits through the album’s final minute, culminating in a harmonic flourish so crystalline, so fragile-sounding, and yet so ambitious and musically complex that it’s almost the only way this album could end.
And Veckatimest is filled with moments like that. Grizzly Bear are a normal band. They have guitars and drums and bass and sometimes piano, and they can write songs that fit that format more traditionally; but a thousand bands sound like that. Hell, a million. Veckatimest sounds like everything ever and nothing all at once. Perhaps the reason I had a hard time starting this review is that it’s hard to convey its singular beauty without you hearing it first.
Playlist track: “Two Weeks”, by simple virtue of sounding great even when removed from the greater context.
Drew's Album of the Day 