:: Track Listing

Easier
2. Lullabye [mp3]
3. Knife
4. Central And Remote
5. Little Brother
6. Plans
7. Marla
8. On A Neck, On A Spit [mp3]
9. Reprise
10. Colorado

:: Record Review

Grizzly Bear

Yellow House
(Warp; 2006)

Rating: 86%
Combined Rating: 83%


Ever wonder about the secret life of bruins? (It’s an extended metaphor; bear with me.) Somewhere between the cuddly teddy and the gruesome man-eaters of Grizzly Man lies a pawing, ineffable truth: a world of scents and sounds, endless treescapes and moments of sudden ferocity and quiet comfort. The dull senses of man are unknown, and color is vibrance, hunger is survival and noise -- from roar to barely uttered grunt -- is deafening. Everything is huge, from the skyscraping treetops to the sunset’s bloody landfall.

In the long, languid moments between eating and, well, sleeping, I don’t know what bears do. Whether the four men who comprise Grizzly Bear have any greater insight is arguable, but either way, Yellow House -- the band's second album, full of both pastoral beauty and brief visions of untamed wilderness -- captures a primal, instinctual quality, inhabiting nature rather than romanticizing it. The album may have been recorded in the titular abode, but the band sounds like it’s playing in a cave. Like Animal Collective -- har, har -- Grizzly Bear makes music from a circle of cavernous reverb and cloth-covered microphones, giving everything a warm, textured feeling. The effect is one of distance, but the band is only over the next hill; not quite lo-fi but lacking a digital sheen, the songs maintain a kind of wonderful analog balance. Thanks to creative sonic arrangements (the album is a joy on headphones), everything sticks out, and the unpredictable vocal harmonies and tentative acoustic instrumentation that provide the foundation for much of Yellow House are as exciting as the moments of rough electricity that claw through songs like “Central and Remote” and “Colorado.”

While the album is Grizzly Bear’s first project as a full-fledged band, the group seems remarkably comfortable in its sound, with the songwriting always playing to the production’s considerable strength. “On a Neck, On a Spit” begins as the disc’s barest ballad, swaying back and forth in an almost country-western way before electric guitars and crushing drum rolls halt the song in its tracks; the acoustic guitars pick up again, reinvigorated, only to fall again before the furious magma lines of distortion race across the song’s back. In “Colorado,” the vocals echo across a canyon that singer Edward Droste stretches to fill: “Colorado, Colorado, Colora-a-aado.” Then, a figurative sparring between words and music as he calls “What now, what now, what now?” against the stumbling of belligerent chords.

What makes the sonic grandeur more than just the unknowing wonder of animal dreams is the craftsmanship, the source material. From the opening counterpoint melodies of “Easier,” it’s clear that this is folk music, or at least a mutated form of it: acoustic guitars and banjos make early appearances in the song’s echo chamber den, tugging back and forth in answer to the introductory melodies. With its doo-wop melody and Motown guitar stabs, “Knife” plays like an early ‘60s side, albeit one performed from a treetop in the middle of Yosemite. Guitarist/vocalist Daniel Rossen's lyrics are just ambiguous enough to provide humanism without breaking the mood, often drawing strength from repetition: “Each day, I spend it with you now / All my time, spend it with you now / Out here no one can hear me” he chants like a mantra on “On a Neck, On a Spit,” giving a sudden paranoid thrust to the music’s urgency.

Throughout Yellow House, the attention paid to songwriting is equal to that lavished on dynamics and pacing. The melodies are entrancing, made even more intriguing by their submergence within the reverb, together resulting in an album whose scope and sound are impossible to ignore. The music of Grizzly Bear captures the fury and beauty of Nature without sacrificing its own humanity or abandoning traditionalist songwriting structures; instead, the band brings them into the woods. After a few hours with this album, it’s hard to imagine wanting to be anywhere else. David Greenwald :: 14 September 2006 |