Grizzly Bear has caught some flack on this blog, but the jury was still out for me going into last night’s show. I bought Yellow House a few weeks ago, and while I had listened to it through a few times and found it intriguing (if not exactly catchy), I was not convinced enough to drop $9.99 on Veckatimest (or the other one, or the EP). It wasn’t that Grizzly Bear’s brand of wafting psychedelia turned me off; it was that after each listen I came away having absorbed nothing–not a single lyric, theme, or idea. I would listen again, straining to concentrate on the music, finding this impossible. For all its entrancing dynamics, the music just didn’t have any handholds. I wanted to ride along, but it kept slipping away.

Read More “Sound Walls: Grizzly Bear & Here We Go Magic at 9:30″ »

Grizzly Bear: “Cheerleader”
Who are we kidding—everybody and their mother has already downloaded Grizzly Bear’s new album Veckatimest, which leaked a few weeks ago, in its entirety. So, it would seem that any official posting of the record’s first single, “Cheerleader”, is sort of a day late and a dollar short. But “Cheerleader,” with its Van Dyke Parks-inspired pop-noodling, offers a little bit of everything that Grizzly Bear’s third record has to offer–children’s choirs, orchestral grandiosity, and dandy falsetto. And if those are things that you find irritating en masse, they’re a little easier to appreciate in one compact 5-minute dose.

Health: “Die Slow”

Los Angeles noise-punks Health, whose debut LP sounded sort of like a vocoder getting tossed down a particularly ragged set of stairs, get a little more overtly tuneful on this new single. In fact, “Die Slow”, with its foreboding industrial synths, clubby rhythm, and uneasy vocals, probably could have sold a fair share of cassingles in ‘94. It’s the best argument yet for MTV to bring Alternative Nation out of retirement.

Stuart Murdoch: “God Help the Girl”
Give Stuart Murdoch some credit for knowing what he does best: wistful, thoroughly orchestrated, twee-pop about young, hip, and lonely women. This song from the Belle & Sebastian songwriter’s long-in-the-works musical, God Help the Girl, doesn’t do much to upend that winning formula. The strings, the dashed hopes, and the necessary kitchen-sink-drama lyrics are all there, only now there’s a real-life hipster-woman belting it out, instead of Murdoch.

Kid Cudi feat. Kanye West, Common, Lady Gaga: “I Poke Her Face”
Kid Cudi’s latest leak finds him rapping alongside his majordomo, Kanye West, and, annoyingly, Lady Gaga, whose bratty scatting makes up a significant portion of the backing track. But rendered into a rhythm track, Gaga isn’t half-bad, and she certainly can’t bring down Cudi and Kanye’s high-brow rhymes about “getting brain in the library.”

Earlier this week, the upcoming Grizzly Bear album, Veckatimest, leaked. We gave our first-impressions of the album. While a colleague joked that the much-anticipated LP was all texture and scaffolding and no melody, we disagree! We love the album more and more with each listen no matter the bootleg’s sound quality.

Yesterday, the band responded in a blog item about the leak:

“So yeah, we are kind of bummed this leaked so early. We know it’s not the 90’s anymore and times have changed, and we’re super grateful for all the support people have shown us on the blogs and internet, but we were kind of hoping it wouldn’t happen this soon.

Ultimately we feel like we put out a great album and hope people enjoy it, and we really hope people take the time to pre-order and support the good one-and-a-half years it took to write and record it.

I promise you the album art for both CD and vinyl is going to be gorgeous. And a bonus: all vinyl people will get a high quality download coupon with their purchase.

Leaking is a tricky subject; as we all know, I’ve had my run ins with the law O__o (Hi, Mr. Sheriff!) I have conflicting opinions about it, as it’s really complicated, but ultimately it saddens me that a bummer-quality version of Veckatimest is going around. Please consider putting your energies into a pre-order or into waiting till May 26 for the album the way we intend it to be presented.

Not to get all mushy, but we definitely put a lot of love and work into this one and are just excited to hit the road and tour it again.”

The band’s singer/songwriter Ed Droste was more fun on Twitter.

Read More “Ed Droste Responds To Grizzly Bear Album Leak” »

The new Grizzly Bear album, Veckatimest, leaked last night. Unexpected, sure. First link was a prank. By then, the real thing had already hit the message boards. It was Grizzly Bear’s night. Even then people complained. Wha? Only 128 kbps? Indie Beggars are assholes. Showed me at least that Grizzly Bear knew about sound and marketing. People expect big things and big sounds from them; they don’t want to listen to Orchestrated Pop with no 128 kbps. The band tweets and blogs. Every nerd had to file a blog post on the album art being released, the tracklist being finalized, the album going up for a vinyl pre-order on Insound. So when it leaked last night, I guess people wanted more, more, more.

But fuck it. Here’s a first take at 128.

Read More “Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest Leaks” »

Thank god for Twitter. How else would bloggers find out the name and production stage of Grizzly Bear’s new album if Ed Droste wasn’t tweeting away the details?

Read More “New Grizzly Bear Album …” »

Anyone familiar with Brooklyn-based experimental folk outfit Grizzly Bear noticed a new sound emerging from their performance of two unreleased songs on KCRW and Letterman; the songs kept their charming reverb and signature vocal harmonizations, but they departed from the dissonance and sound experimentation that marked Horn of Plenty and Yellow House. With the newest Grizzly Bear album still in production, singer-guitarist Daniel Rossen has just released In Ear Park with Department of Eagles, a project Rossen started while an undergrad at NYU. With production by fellow Grizzly Bear Chris Taylor, the album reflects the band’s later work—it’s grounded in a more radio-friendly, pop-infused style but still evokes the choruses and multi-instrumental collaborations that are Grizzly Bear’s trademark. Check out their performance last week on Late Night With Conan O’Brien: