Grizzly Bear: Now With More Zzzzzzz...

I think complaining about mainstream culture is, ultimately, a waste of one's time. It is an absolutely disgusting thing to behold, and when I did such things (at the age when one feels compelled to complain about Top 40 radio and MTV and what have you), I felt very icky about it years later. Really, you're not accomplishing anything by bitching about how listening to pop radio is horrible and how they play the same 15 songs over and over again. It's a fact of life; we've all moved on. (I like to think we have, at least.)

Similarly, I find it difficult to feel any reaction when an artist proclaimed to be "indie" by the powers that be encounters a modicum of success. One isn't accomplishing anything by calling the Shins sellouts because their record hit Billboard's Top 10 for one week: Nirvana came and went and showed us all that things like that happen. The notion of selling out is overblown, anyway: the archaic notion that a successful band has "sold out" more often stems around the band's original fans no longer feeling as if they're part of a super-secret, exclusive club than any legitimate complaints about an artist making musical concessions for the purpose of financial gain. (To date, I can only think of one example of this.)

Recently, the experimental folk-rock collective Grizzly Bear became the latest to follow in the steps of The Shins, Death Cab For Cutie, and The Decemberists as an indie-rock darling that received its brief flirtation with mainstream success after its latest record, Veckatimest debuted at number eight on Billboard's album charts. The reaction was typical: the indie-rock press was quick to jump on this as an instance of either the cool kids taking over or the unwashed masses developing good taste in between listening to Green Day singles and eating fast food. (Pitchfork's response was typically pretentious.) Now, what does this say about Grizzly Bear? Have the freaky folkies from Brooklyn leaped on to some alt-rock zeitgeist, ready to join Phoenix and The Decemberists in the hallowed halls of artists that get late-night play on WRXP? One listen to Veckatimest indicates otherwise.

Don't get me wrong; Grizzly Bear are a talented band. Their previous record, Yellow House, was an interesting little thing, a collection of muted folk musings on damaged psyches and one flat-out excellent song ("Knife"). The arrangements were complex and intricate, and Veckatimest continues that tradition. It's louder than Yellow House; the arrangements are fuller, giving the songs a sonic heft that they lacked previously. The makings of a great record are here, right in front of us...and yet I'm not completely impressed. I respect what Grizzly Bear have done here: they're clearly more than a bunch of spoiled hipster brats playing lo-fi surf-rock bullshit. However, Veckatimest doesn't resonate the way I think a great album should. It's certainly an impressive piece of work, but each listen makes the record feel like a museum piece: we can look, yes, but we dare not touch anything.

In some ways, Grizzly Bear's talent is a bit of a downfall. The complexity of Veckatimest more often than not keeps the listener at arm's length, preventing one from really enjoying the record. This is not to say that any sort of complex pop music is impossible to love: as a recent example, the last two Dirty Projectors albums have done similar things (albeit with less instrumental window dressing), and those records are successes in ways Grizzly Bear have yet to achieve. But, the indie rock press have made their declaration, and Veckatimest is now the new Greatest Album That You Must Hear Before You Die. It's a nice record, but one could be forgiven for skipping it.