Dulce et Veckatimest, A Grizzly Bear Review

*MP3: Grizzly Bear - “Fine For Now”
*MP3: Grizzly Bear - “About Face”

Veckatimest is the sound of a band trying very, very hard.  It’s also a fantastic record, a triumph not only of musicianship and technique, but of stirring pathos and epic intent.  Ambition can be an ugly thing, especially on a band’s second record, but Grizzly Bear’s first album, Yellow House, should have been a clear sign that this was a band that was formed solely for the pursuit of detail, difficulty, and ultimate beauty.  Veckatimest is all those things, yet somehow manages to sound breezier and more accessible than its predecessor.

Without having the time or space to describe adequately the intricacies of each track on this album, I’ll sum up its emotional impact in two free associations,  the first being the first 30 seconds of “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” on Arcade Fire’s first record, Funeral. Think of the power of those first seconds one of the decade’s other great albums, that shivering guitar and pizzicato strings, the immediate sensation of the new and alien.  Now imagine that sensation expanded into a 12-part symphony, each movement drawing on the whole, but also moving, whirling, thrashing within their own spheres, attacking space and cowering away from it, electronica and string ornamentation dancing nimbly around haunting melodies.  This is Veckatimest, a construct more than an album.

“Haunting” is a word for this album.  Another is “moving.”  Both of these words also describe the Victorian novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, in which the conflicted love of Heathcliff and Catherine takes center stage.  In describing the nature of their relationship, Catherine posits that if the two of them were to die, love itself would be canceled out, and the world would turn to “a mighty stranger.”  Lyrically, Veckatimest seems to describe scenes of doomed love, its fragmented barbs wrestling quietly in the domestic corners of life.  Musically, this album is a mighty stranger, a culmination of many musicals ideas which have come before, and yet as a whole, unlike any of them.

The mighty stranger album is one that many bands have aspired to make. The Beach Boys did it once with Pet Sounds, Radiohead may have done it twice in Ok Computer and Kid A, and The Beatles may have had almost an entire catalog of it.  Grizzly Bear’s two albums have already been fraught with big ideas executed with cleverly arranged music, and their ambitions and earnest intentions seem in the right place to make more.  Whatever the case, Veckatimest, like its uninhabited New England island namesake, is a solitary and austere record of where music was and where it could be.  In the album’s final track, “Foreground,” one seems to hear the very passing of a distressing decade, a shimmering chorus of voices turning away from beauty and shuffling quietly into the distant rumbling dark of the unknown.  I hope they will take this album with them.

(Erik Martz)