While Yellow House began with a low-key folky shuffle, Veckatimest’s opener 'Southern Point' signals straight away that Grizzly Bear mean business: urgent, with a nervy, epic feel that nods to Radiohead, it shows the continued evolution of a band who have been comfortably shifting from bedroom to stage over the course of their three albums. It's followed by 'Two Weeks', a song with a sunny, rhythmic bounce more catchy and immediate than anything the band have done before. In several places, the album has a noticeably more "rock” feel than its predecessors, the band’s steady touring of the past few years lending their compositions a live energy - and an obvious determination to be more focused and direct - already hinted at on 2007’s Friend EP. Songs like 'All We Ask' may recall the dreamy, pastoral folk of Yellow House but elsewhere (like the finale of 'Fine For Now') the cavernous arrangements turn into full-on rock-outs; the songs here are also a little shorter, for the most part, and the textures generally less dense. Album closer 'Foreground', for example, is surprising (coming from a band known for their complex harmonies and baroque orchestral arrangements) in the way it mirrors its title by resisting all but the most necessary ornamentation in order to keep the piano and vocal centre stage, with beautiful and affecting results.
In terms of reference points, we’re still talking 60s orchestral pop, in particular The Beach Boys and Van Dyke Parks - the intro to 'I Live With You' is pure Smile – while Daniel Rossen’s vocal delivery often recalls Paul Simon's. There’s also a hint of the stop-start rhythms of 'He Hit Me' (their Crystals cover on Friend) on those in 'Cheerleader' and 'While You Wait For The Others'. However, it's hard to pin any of these songs down too closely: the beauty of Grizzly Bear's craft is the way the songs manage to sound familiar and remote at the same time, blending classic sounds into something more than the sum of their parts.
What makes the album such an essential listen is how much ground it covers, and how effortless and natural it all seems; it has a coherence and flow that belies the care of its construction, and often leads you to forget that there are two songwriters at work. The gorgeous 'Cheerleader' is perhaps the best example of this, Veckatimest in microcosm: an almost 5-minute track that features a guest vocalist, the Brooklyn Boys’ Choir, strings and flutes, yet still manages to sound restrained, unforced and even intimate, seeming to drift by in no time and revealing more with every listen. The mood, too, hints at the vague sense of dreamy melancholy hanging over the album, as Victoria Legrand’s wistful vocals - “I should have been myself/I should have made it matter” - echo over Rossen’s sparse guitar lines and Bear’s steady, controlled drumming. There’s an air of distance and mystery at the heart of these songs, a questioning, thoughtful kind of mood which lends an elusive quality to even their most direct moments.
Veckatimest is the sound of a band at the top of their game, pushing their own limits while retaining their many strengths: if that doesn’t deserve five stars, then we don’t know what does. Whether you’re new to Grizzly Bear, a casual listener, or a fan who’s already spent months with a poor-quality download, you owe it to your ears to go out and get the real thing. It'll be up there in the end-of-year lists, but leave it to the nerds to argue over whether this or Merriweather is 2009’s best so far: for now, put your headphones on and enjoy a record to grace any year.
