Grizzly Bear: Painted Ruins CD review – out of hibernation
From unpromising beginnings, the indie band’s fifth album achieves an uncanny brilliance.
he list of mid-2000s indie bands that should have given up the ghost never stops growing. It’s hard to remember the last time that the Strokes, Interpol, Kings Of Leon or even Arcade Fire looked like they remembered why they got into this in the first place. Reading the press around Grizzly Bear’s new album, it’s tempting to suggest they should be cashing in their chips too.
Having abandoned Brooklyn for upstate New York (co-frontman Daniel Rossen) and LA (the other three), they didn’t speak for a year after they finished touring 2012’s widely acclaimed album Shields. When bassist Chris Taylor’s pestering emails about a new record went unheeded, he started a cloud account for them to share ideas and taught himself guitar to get the ball rolling. Unsurprisingly, their fifth album didn’t take until fragments of the band met to write and they eventually started having fun. Roll on the making-of documentary.
Yet somehow, they’ve turned this dislocation into uncanny brilliance. Unbeholden to the band’s existence, Painted Ruins has a cavalier quality that you’d struggle to spot in its tense forebears. Rossen and Ed Droste still spindle out riffs that crest like fractal waves, and their haunted Beach Boys melodies echo through the dense orchestrations. But where they used to overlap neat pastoral melodies until the ground felt like it was churning beneath you, the landscape here is smouldering, godforsaken and explosive, their awkwardness untamed.
There are a few consistent differences. Drummer Chris Bear is untethered from their lattice-like arrangements, and free to steer proceedings. With Taylor doing his best Peter Hook impression, they give the glitzy Mourning Sound a surprisingly peppy athleticism, making Grizzly Bear into motorik questers rather than the band of old concerned solely with their immediate field of vision. While the detailing is still incredibly myopic – Three Rings evokes a dirty iceberg slipping into the sea shard by shard – bold paint splatters now daub their crosshatchings.
