Plumbiferous Media

Griz­zly Bear is a four-man indie band on a largely elec­tronic label, and as such they’re rather unique. They’ve been described in a myr­iad of ways, mostly as folk, rock, and an exper­i­men­tal fusion of both. The band ded­i­cates itself to using a vari­ety of sound both in vocals and in instru­men­ta­tion, which is evi­dent in its music. How­ever, with­out proper orga­ni­za­tion, this leads to clut­ter rather than beauty. Their newest album, Veck­a­timest, suf­fers greatly from this - though it has some strong points.

On first glance, the vocals of Veck­a­timest seem to float oddly above the clut­ter of the music, spa­cious but not quite ethe­real. It’s this sub­lime posi­tion, then, that makes their flaws quite so obvi­ous. Though the vocals do not lack tech­ni­cal pro­fi­ciency, aes­thet­i­cally they have a num­ber of issues. Griz­zly Bear has obvi­ously tried for an almost-breathy, all-inclusive set of vocals, and to some degree they’ve suc­ceeded in that. But the inces­sant lay­er­ing of backup vocals tends to con­fuse the purity which is the best aspect of the vocals, and instead of the beauty of clear vocals we’re left with a con­vo­luted, some­what irri­tat­ing mud­dle. Addi­tions such as the back­ing choir on “South­ern Point” fail to advance this jum­ble, and instead it’s quite sta­tic, sit­ting like a sec­ond dis­or­ga­nized clump upon the one con­structed hap­haz­ardly by the music.

The mud­dle of the vocals cer­tainly isn’t improved by the lyrics, which effort­lessly fade into the con­fu­sion. Griz­zly Bear has writ­ten excep­tion­ally sim­ple, non-notable lyrics which, when com­bined with the vocals, become essen­tially triv­ial and con­tribute very lit­tle to the album except to give the vocal­ists some­thing to sing.

Each indi­vid­ual instru­ment on Veck­a­timest plays its line clearly and well, and each is decently inter­est­ing. Prob­lems, how­ever, occur when the lines are mixed together. Not only do the lines only serve to con­vo­lute each other, as they cer­tainly don’t pair well together, but the often highly repet­i­tive lines never even begin to show any sort of direc­tion. While a com­plex mess can some­times be dealt with quite well, doing so is sig­nif­i­cantly harder if it does not develop over time. Need­less to say, the mess of instru­men­tals com­bined with the mud­dled vocals do not make a very inter­est­ing album.

The worst exam­ple of this mess is on the first track. On “South­ern Point,” not only do the lines not work well with one another, but the track con­tains mul­ti­ple clearly dis­tinct sec­tions that could eas­ily be their own tracks. Veck­a­timest does have its occa­sional moments though. Even though the lines of “Cheer­leader” are pos­si­bly the most repet­i­tive lines of the album, they do form a sig­nif­i­cantly more com­pre­hen­si­ble and well con­structed track, if only because of “Cheerleader’s” simplicity.

The mem­bers of Griz­zly Bear are all clearly tal­ented, and the music each mem­ber pro­duces does not account for this album’s prob­lems. Instead, the album weak­ened once the mem­bers started to com­bine their indi­vid­ual sounds, as the only thing the mem­bers seemed to have agreed upon con­sis­tently was the tempo. Veck­a­timest is not a strong album, and it is clearly not Griz­zly Bear’s best pos­si­ble work.

This post is tagged 20-29, Grizzly Bear