Album of the Year

With their previous releases, Horn of Plenty (2004) and Yellow House (2006), the Brooklyn-based indie rockers of Grizzly Bear cemented their status as a solid group of musicians with a flair for well-crafted hooks and harmonious melodies. With their latest release, Veckatimest (2009), the foursome has pushed that talent to new heights, and the result is shear genius.

I doesn’t take long for the band’s boundless ambition to bubble up to the record’s surface. Opener “Southern Point” begins with the slow, muted murmur of a mysterious bass line, the bare rhythm of an acoustic guitar and an eclectic mix of drum beats slowly swelling in intensity until the ensemble finally explodes into a furiously confident rush of folk-jazz. Both suddenly and effortlessly, the album transitions into “Two weeks”, a masterful piece of pop-rock/Americana that can best be described as a mix of Sgt. Pepper’s and Simon and Garfunkel, with a little Radiohead thrown in for good measure.

The album juxtaposes somber, brooding themes bathed in the starry echoes of string quartets and choral arrangements, like on tracks “All we ask”, “Fine for Now”, and “Foreground”, with the more up-tempo beats of songs like “About Face”, and “While you were waiting for others”, which, despite their catchy hooks, remain shrouded in lyrical ambiguity: “You could wait for substance/As long as you like/Or just wait out the evening/And always ask me why”. “Cheerleader” is a brilliant bit of pop-rock in its most stripped-down, elemental form, and serves as an added testament to the breadth that Grizzly Bear achieves on this record.

Released in the summer of 2009, Veckatimest enters a musical arena distinguished by mediocrity and uniformity, a landscape in which autotune and monotonous, computerized drumbeats have become acceptable substitutions to stirring vocals and meticulously crafted melodies. I dare you to look at the top 20 songs in the Billboard Hot 100 singles charts and find a one that has an actual instrument in it. Seriously, try it.

I discovered this album not through my local radio station or through word-of-mouth, but rather after hours of scouring online radio shows and websites like KCRW.com (a sad indication of the utter lack of any variety in popular music these days), hungry for something new and wildly original, hungry for musicians playing instruments to songs they composed. With Veckatimest, my efforts were generously rewarded.

Most of what makes this record so dazzling is the fact that its overall sound and purpose are so hard to pin down. Unlike many albums taking up the tops spots on the charts today, this is a rich work, layered in delicately balanced melodic intricacies that come to form hauntingly beautiful and atmospheric music. You will find yourself diving into it again and again just for the pleasure and satisfaction of picking these layers apart. Savor every bit of it.