Grizzly Bear - Shields

It took me a long time to appreciate Grizzly Bear's musical style.  My first exposure to their sound was through their amazingly successful album Veckatimest, and for a time I found myself bored with their music.  Eventually one day, while listening to Veckatimest in the tranquil setting  of UVic's library, the quiet beauty of their music hit me.  Their vocal harmonies are complex and haunting, the guitar work is dazzling, and it is all composed with a minute attention to detail that gives their music the dignified beauty of a church hymn.

Grizzly Bear rewards you for the attention you put into them.  Many of the intricacies in their music are not noticeable on the first listen, but the band is easy to appreciate after sitting down and paying close attention to all of the different sounds you will hear.  This density can be missed on a casual listen, but like closely examining the brushstrokes allows you to appreciate the work of a great painter, sitting down with any Grizzly Bear album will reward you with a great experience.

This is all still true for Grizzly Bear's new release Shields.  Even though this new album is altogether more lively than much of their earlier work, they still consistently craft beautiful atmospheres with their meticulous instrumentation.

The opener, and single, "Sleeping Ute" is torrential.  The guitar work soars and crashes with the cymbals and drum rolls, like waves in a storm and the guitar effects they introduce at 2:07 adds a level of gloss to this track that would make Ratatat drool.  The next track "Speak in Rounds" emerges from the sea foam of the opener, and starts out much more relaxed with some beautiful vocals from Daniel Rossen.  Before long though, the pace picks up again and acoustic guitars dominate the landscape.

There are some slower tracks on this album such as "The Hunt," "Adelma," and "What's wrong."  These songs all feature Rossen's voice alone, usually backed by just organs or keys and percussion.  Grizzly Bear can vary its instrumentation quite a bit and still sound very coherent on the album level, and its nice to see that when they use more instruments and take more time they really run wild with it successfully.  A nice balance between their two extremes of serene beauty and energetic brilliance is the 7:00 minute closer, and my favourite track "Sun in Your Eyes."

The density of this album is truly astounding.  Only two of the songs are under four minutes, and of that "Adelma" is just a short, atmospheric, breather between some of the most engaging songs.  The slower songs are well placed, and they give the album a smooth flow without too much down time and without burning you out.  Whereas on Veckatimest, I found that the slow pace made it hard to engage with upon a first listen, this album had me engaged from the moment I pressed play, and I find myself coming back again and again to examine the complexity in more minute detail.