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View Poll Results: Rate Veckatimest
Brilliant 15 46.88%
Very Good 12 37.50%
Average 5 15.63%
Poor 0 0%
Terrible 0 0%
Voters: 32. You may not vote on this poll

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Old 06-05-2009, 10:07 PM   #11 (permalink)
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I'm having trouble getting into it so far. Right now I'm leaning towards skipping buying this one. Strange too, seems like most people were infatuated with it right out the gate (didn't need time for it to grow on people)- so I'm wondering if it will actually grow on me eventually, or if it's just not my style.
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Old 06-06-2009, 02:57 AM   #12 (permalink)
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Great review here. Just, just great.

Grizzly Bear




Quote:
Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest recently became the #8 album in the country, due to $3.99 Amazon downloads, fawning reviews and the fact that 33,000 copies qualifies for Top Ten status in this pathetic music-buying climate. No matter how "big" it gets, though, Grizzly Bear will always attract the most unintimidating following imaginable, consisting entirely of latent hippies disguised as hipsters. These prematurely enfeebled fans boast the musical taste and muscle mass of 61-year-old Woodstock survivors, and Grizzly Bear speaks gently to their delicate ears.


New York magazineGrizzly Bear certainly has the highest "who the fuck is that?" factor of any Top Ten band I could ever select (except the current #7, Wisin & Yandel. No fucking clue.) They're poised near Lady GaGa and Taylor Swift on the charts, yet absolutely no one has heard of these guys except music blog writers/readers and other musicians with which they've played.


Radiohead toured with Grizzly Bear, and guitarist Jonny Greenwood called them his "favorite band in the world," stoking fears that for its next project, Radiohead might lock itself inside a rustic shack to write fruity barbershop-quartet songs. Apparently, though, Greenwood was just adding his voice to a nearly unanimous chorus of praise, which has started to resemble those ape-shit harmonies Grizzly Bear does all the goddamn time.


A feature in New York magazine purports to explain how Grizzly Bear "became everybody's favorite New York band." "Everybody" requires just one debunker in order to become demonstrably untrue, and I'm comfortable being that solitary contrarian, because I'm pretty fucking sure that in my personal hierarchy, Sonic Youth will never be usurped by a Precious Moments version of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

Still, Grizzly Bear sucks less than previous "everybody's favorite" New York bands such as The Strokes and Interpol (I refuse to believe The Bravery has ever been anybody's favorite band, let alone everybody's), so I'll continue reading this profile. Maybe Grizzly Bear's personalities will prove more compelling than its symphonic somnolence. Let's look at some details from the first paragraph:


Grizzly Bear assembles in a not-yet-open-to-the-public restaurant in Williamsburg.
Bassist Chris Taylor pronounces a glass of wine to be "robust," without reported irony.
The group enjoys a laugh at the revelation that the quail entree is "quail-sized," then every member orders beet salad. Singer Ed Droste jokingly frets "how lame is it that they all ordered the beet salad?"
OK, so the people who produce this glorified NPR bumper music are "yuppie nerds." At least they have consistency going for them. Also, "robust" is exactly the word several sites have used to describe Grizzly Bear, demonstrating the parallels between wine snobs and insufferable music reviewers. In the words of Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka, "whenever I see the word 'robust,' I picture a morbidly obese homeless man wearing a shirt that's too small for him, and the buttons are just about to pop off." Unfortunately, an image search produced nothing of the sort, but it did randomly generate a shirtless Iggy Pop, scarf flapping in the rotary-fan breeze. Grizzly Bear sounds nothing like that picture.

Anyway, let's address Droste's premise that eating beets might make Grizzly Bear seem lame. Beets actually qualify as edgy compared to Grizzly Bear. They can make you gag and pee red. Grizzly Bear is more like a bottle of pomegranate juice, which the incomparably dorky Droste once dressed as for Halloween: Self-impressed people ramble on about its merits -- so healthy, so robust -- until by the time you taste it, it's an inevitable ****ing letdown.


What the fuck is happening behind that Fun Sheet?



On Veckatimest, Grizzly Bear seems to have literally conjured the ghosts of late-'60s folk-pop, summoning the synchronized ghostly moans of Gram Parsons, dead Byrd Gene Clark, and Brian Wilson's buried brothers. The group relocates the Beach Boys' multi-layered harmonies from Surftown U.S.A. to some rustic snowed-in cabin, displacing most of the good vibrations in the process. It's good time oldies made gloomy and new for boring youth.


People describe Grizzly Bear as "epic," because the band's droning feyness and relentless scale-singing make four-minute songs feel like they last at least twenty. They also label Grizzly Bear "experimental" due to its use of varying approaches. For example, "Cheerleader" starts out with some gay-hippie funk, then devolves until it sounds like sensitive men crooning about their feelings around a campfire while pounding a drum circle.

Occasionally, Grizzly Bear starts "rocking out," which is cute in a declawed-kitten-swiping-furiously kind of way. The idling electric-guitar crackles and modest crescendos flash back to the dark ages before Blue Cheer and The Who and fucking Manowar invented rock volume, an era when people would hear Donovan and think "whoa, that's heavy."

With Veckatimest, Grizzly Bear has created a Pet Sounds for our generation. Unfortunately, subsequent generations don't require superfluous revamps of existing albums that remain widely available. And because these compositions were so fastidiously arranged in the studio, Grizzly Bear can't replicate most of them during concerts, making the whole exercise even more pointless. At least live audiences can still witness the group's weird "Motownphilly"-style vocal acrobatics. Grizzly Bear is that chamber pop/a cappella vocal soul hybrid no one requested, Beach Boyz II Men.





On the bright side, I enjoy the "Two Weeks" video, both because it reveals that the group's members look just as much like freakish church-choir mutants as I'd imagined and because it makes it easier to bear the repetitive plinking of a single piano note when I know the clip's going to culminate in the offenders' heads bursting into flame.
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Old 06-11-2009, 11:24 PM   #13 (permalink)
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Veckatimest is definitely one of the years best. "Two Weeks" can definitely be close to the top of the years best songs. The first four tracks are golden, parts of the middle of the album get a bit weaker, but they still make the album complete, it is what it is. "While You Wait for the Others" is probably my favorite, the climax of that song is beautiful on the ears. It's suiting that after that song, the following track is the gentle "Foreground". If Merriweather Post Pavillon is the party, then Veckatimest is the morning after.
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Old 06-11-2009, 11:41 PM   #14 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad Stengel View Post
I can't fathom anything challenging "Two Weeks" for song of the year.
I can. "Fine For Now", and "Cheerleader".
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Old 06-13-2009, 02:39 AM   #15 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rainard Jalen View Post
I can. "Fine For Now", and "Cheerleader".
I agree. I finally bought this album, and I'll admit it's better than I thought (still worse than the hype though). Drumming intrigues me- crashing cymbals et al. I'll say average or above average.
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Life is just blah, blah, blah
You hope for blah
And sometimes you find it, but mostly it's blah
And waiting for blah
And hoping you were right about the blahs you made
And then, just when you think you've got the whole blah'd damn thing figured out
And you're surrounded by the ones you blah
Death shows up... anddd blah, blah, blah.
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Old 06-14-2009, 01:18 AM   #16 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bane of your existence View Post
Great review here. Just, just great.

Grizzly Bear
LIKE:

The fact that he compared it to Pet Sounds. It reminds me a lot of Pet Sounds.

DISLIKE:

I stopped taking him seriously when he mentioned Mastodon in a praise-like fashion.
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Old 06-14-2009, 12:09 PM   #17 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bane of your existence View Post
Great review here. Just, just great.

Grizzly Bear
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Old 06-15-2009, 12:19 PM   #18 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad Stengel View Post
DISLIKE:

I stopped taking him seriously when he mentioned Mastodon in a praise-like fashion.
I agree, Mastodon sucks.
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Old 06-21-2009, 02:50 PM   #19 (permalink)
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Album of the Year material.
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Old 06-22-2009, 01:48 AM   #20 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Stone Birds View Post
I agree, Mastodon sucks.
how so?

also, where was mastodon mentioned in the article?
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