The music sounds as if it's tossing and turning: "If I could find peace … If I could lie still … But I can't help myself." The opener, Sleeping Ute, is every bit as knotty as anything on Veckatimest, but its odd time signature and synthesiser arpeggios appear to be there for a purpose. Speak in Rounds builds to a climax that – to use a phrase not much associated with Grizzly Bear – rocks, and furthermore rocks in a viscerally thrilling manner. But more often, it sounds as if Grizzly Bear have spent their time away digging out the emotions that sometimes get buried beneath the technical fireworks. There are certainly moments when Shields sounds exactly like you might expect something that's been agonised over by a bunch of clever American indie musicians for three years to sound: What's Wrong drifts beautifully along without connecting, its intricate mesh of woodwind, vocal harmonies, jazzy drum patterns and string interludes all good judgment and no gut-punch. Under the circumstances, the news that the followup has taken three apparently quite agonising years to complete – with an entire album scrapped in the process – might not be entirely welcome. As with a lot of music from what you might call the brains-trust end of the US indie spectrum, it occasionally felt like a difficult scientific problem was being solved in front of you: every note and noise appeared to have been thought carefully through, with an inevitable effect. It was an impressively ambitious and complex album, but if you had to level a criticism at Veckatimest, you could argue it was easier to admire than adore. In fact, it sounded more like their trickiest record to date, a rich, dense weave of sound that variously involved the composer Nico Muhly, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and a string quartet drawn from the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. To hear Grizzly Bear talk about its accessibility, you would have thought Veckatimest was a brazen lunge for the mainstream jugular involving a guest appearance from Justin Bieber and production by Calvin Harris and Will.I.Am. In 2009, they crashed into the US top 10 with their third album, Veckatimest.Īn alt-rock band hitting it big in Britain after five years, with their third album, would be in itself a talking point, but it was compounded by the fact that Veckatimest was an improbable candidate for top 10 success. But the tape circulated and the band toured relentlessly: following the release of 2006's Yellow House, they supported Radiohead, whose guitarist Jonny Greenwood acclaimed them as his favourite band. They started life in 2004 – a year Britain was falling, at various angles, for Razorlight, the Others, the 22-20s and Goldie Lookin' Chain – as the home-recording project of Edward Droste, the results meant only to be heard by friends. Compare this to the fortunes of Grizzly Bear. The firework band seems to have become the norm over here: we now expect artists to appear fully formed, then spend the rest of their careers struggling to appear as interesting as they did at first.
A nyone looking for a sobering contrast between the British and American rock scenes could alight on the differing career trajectories of indie bands.
0 kommentar(er)
