Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 25/05/09
Label: Warp

Grizzly Bear's last two albums, "Horn Of Plenty" and "Yellow House", were lovely, heart-pricking things of elegantly poised Americana refracted through the lens of post-rock, but it's the unlikely success of Fleet Foxes - as well as that band's many collaborative voices in the music press - that really sets the scene and ramps up anticipation for Grizzly's third offering. Because of those broadsheet darlings, we've all been awaiting the next delivery of what one Wire critic calls "soft psychedelia", a (mostly American) sound that gets us out of our heads in a blissed-out, faux-spiritual way by nodding to a safe, less unpredictable past. "Veckatimest" fits that bill perfectly.

On first listen, any folk drawn in by the promise, as has been made by a few hardy souls, that these Brooklynites are "the new Animal Collective" will leave unfulfilled - AC have their feet planted firmly in the future. This is sometimes weighty stuff without any of the punch packed by Panda Bear and co. Much too grand and ornate in places (especially on "Hold Still"), the layer upon layer of polite, cotton-through-a-needle intricacy does little for proceedings aside from choke and hide the true loveliness beneath it like a dust-sheet.

As the apologists' favourite phrase goes, though, this really is a slow-burner. Recorded variously in a Brooklyn church, the Catskill Mountains (that'll be why we keep hearing misguided comparisons to Mercury Rev) and Ed Droste's grandmother's house on Cape Cod, there's something huge and hopeful about "Veckatimest" that follows and betters Daniel Rossen's other group, Department Of Eagles. This is the sound of a band rifling through dusty 78s and attempting to capture hundreds of years of Americana - from the coloniser's folk, music hall, swinging jazz, doo-wop and minimalism, right up to post-rock and, once or twice, the whomp-whomp of urban USA - that has been the soundtrack to both triumph and tragedy.

With Nico Muhly (responsible for strings on Bonnie Prince Billy and Antony & The Johnsons' albums) on board, the Grizzly's even have their own Van Dyke Parks to provide fantastical, Disney-ish strings, something they've longed for in their quest to out-Beach Boys the, um, Beach Boys. And at times they do manage to out-strip their harmonies with inter-changing voices that are part-barbershop quartet, part-celestial.

As always, Yahoo! Music remained suspicious to the last. But with such songs as "Southern Point", which builds from shuffling, folk-jazz grooves into a squelchy, winding fairytale, breathtaking piano-pop anthem "Two Weeks" and the towering drama of "I Live with You", we join the consensus: this is a record to swoon over.

    by Chris Parkin