Consider Grizzly Bear's cover of Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart", recorded some time ago and included on Sorry for the Delay, the mini-album collection of demos and early recordings released earlier this year. It finds leader Edward Droste struggling to meet the challenge of the song's strange angles and tricky construction with just an acoustic guitar, mostly by piling on intricately arranged vocal harmony. He slowed the song to half-speed, in part because half-speed is how Grizzly Bear like to do things, and in part because he needed the extra time to get the voices just so. Ten years ago such a cover may have seemed like an ironic appreciation of a corporate rock standard; that Grizzly Bear looked to the pop Yes back then is key, because it suggests that Droste is not afraid to get complicated and that he believes in the potential of widescreen sound.
This faith in something bigger is all over Yellow House, the band's second full-length and debut on Warp. It's not what you might expect from Grizzly Bear after hearing the apartment-recorded Horn of Plenty, the 2004 debut that was essentially a Droste solo record. Grizzly Bear seemed there like any number of post-Microphones indie bands stuck in the realm of lo-fi for lo-fi's sake, ready to let pinched, tinny sound create intimacy when the songs themselves couldn't quite manage. None of this early Grizzly Bear material is bad, but it has a tendency to drift away completely once the music stops, and after the remix companion to Horn of Plenty came out, people seemed to lose interest in the originals.
That's all behind us. Grizzly Bear are a full band now, Droste being joined again by Christopher Bear (on drums, the only holdover from Horn of Plenty), Chris Taylor (on electronics, woodwinds, and bass) and Daniel Rossen (who sings, contributes to songwriting, and plays guitar). They're still recording themselves, but they've grown more ambitious and seem to have acquired some decent gear. The studio this time was a living room in Droste's mother's place near Cape Cod; their own private Big Pink is, indeed, yellow, and they apparently had a lot of time to think about arrangement. No question this grander sonic space is where they belong. Opening track "Easier" lays it all out: flutes, a descending intro tapped out on a rickety upright, sustain pedal to the metal, a smear of fake strings (Mellotron?), and then the acoustic picking and Droste's voice, clear and full-spectrum for the first time and sounding, finally, like it should.
The following "Lullabye" is the album's calling card, the production this time supporting a meandering tune that skips up the side of a mountain. Grizzly Bear exhibit here a tendency that recurs throughout the record, of showing the seams in their songwriting and dividing the songs into mini-suites through jarring moments that signal a shift in emphasis. A discordant guitar tears "Lullabye" in half, separating the tuneful opening, which sounds like a lost Disney tune written to send a rosy-cheeked imp off to sleep, from the dark tower that looms behind. The second half's swirling harmonies and crashing drums evoke a Bob Ezrin-sized edifice that would leave a four-track recorder in a dozen pieces before the first brick was laid.
Such attention to detail and the larger well of resources improves Grizzly Bear at both ends of their range. The quieter songs sound better laced with effects and with the guitar and voice ringing true, and the climaxes carry greater weight. Another example of the latter is "Plans", which begins with a modest shuffle, picks up a chorus of whistling dwarves and some horns on loan from Tom Waits, and finally piles on some go-go nightclub percussion and laptop dissonance as it begins to buckle under its own weight. The imagination of its arrangement is impressive, as is the perfect 30-degree slope upward to its peak.
That's one end of the spectrum. But then they slip in something like the regal waltz "Marla", which was written by Droste's aunt in the 1930s and carries the sparkling dust of its vintage. Grizzly Bear infuse the song with a palpable atmosphere, the live instruments mixing with indistinct sounds courtesy of Chris Taylor's slippery electronics. He seems to be filling a role here similar to David Sitek in TV on the Radio, folding in odd noises at just the right moment to color the tunes in a very specific way. So "Marla", with its strings and accordion, suddenly opens up at the two-minute mark, when an echoing memory of a "sweet" big band 78 streams in for just a few seconds. "On a Neck, On a Spit" contains similar tweaks during its crashing instrumental break, with hard-to-peg wails that could be voices or could be strings but jack up the drama regardless.
Beyond production, Grizzly Bear have stepped up their songwriting in every way, assembling melodies that proceed in a logical fashion but never sound overused or overly familiar. Yellow House is a much better record than we could rightfully have expected from these guys, better, even, than we could have imagined them making. And I find myself wondering how much further they might go, whether another layer of sheen and more production possibilities would push them to even greater heights. There are still moments here where the sound isn't quite all it could be. More money, a better studio, and who knows what might happen. And hey-- what's Trevor Horn going for these days? Ah, a question for another day. For now, we have Yellow House, one of the year's best records.
