GRIZZLY BEARVeckatimest
(Warp)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)
Sometimes you don’t figure out what bugged you about an album until a few months later when you hear another album doing the same thing, only better. Veckatimest, the new disc from Brooklyn freak-folk quartet Grizzly Bear, was recorded in much the same sorts of settings as Great Lake Swimmers’ Lost Channels — in old churches, in cottages near the water, places where you can imagine the band members passing a flask around the campfire every night, practising their harmonies for the next day’s recording session.
Both albums came out sounding lovely, but Grizzly Bear offers much more than the platitudinous prettiness of Great Lake Swimmers. There’s an unstable element underlying every song, whether it’s the shifting, undulating melody of “I Live With You” or the brilliantly arranged youth choir that pops up halfway through “Cheerleader.” The lyrics are hard to grasp at times — the band prefers to write around emotions rather than confront them head-on, repeatedly drifting into the first person plural POV instead of first person singular — and the melodies often feel unresolved as well. But it’s not that the band doesn’t know where they’re going; they just haven’t arrived there yet. And you feel like anything could still happen along the way. The opening line from “Dory” puts it best: Veckatimest is “wildly coherent.”
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